computer HELP!

[Mike Trittipo]

On Oct 25 2010, J F Levin wrote:
> ... need to get a new computer, but I am most desperately 
>concerned with saving all my emails that I have on Eudora ....
>So what do I do now?  How can I save my emails that are on Eudora 
>7.1, and bring them into a new computer?

Your two best choices currently are probably The Bat! or Thunderbird. Each 
does Cyrillic (and Unicode in general) easily. (The Bat! is a Russian 
program.)

As was noted already, there is a program called Eudora Open Source Edition 
(OSE) (a/k/a Penelope) which tries to reproduce some of the features some 
people liked in Eudora. It's called "OSE" because its own developers admit 
it doesn't reproduce enough of the features to justify a "version 8" name. 
I haven't tried it, so I can't comment on its feature set, stability, etc. 
I have no good reason to switch from The Bat! or Thunderbird, each of which 
has a solid history, to a relatively untried program. But you might get 
lucky.

You only ask about "saving" your Eudora email and "bring[ing] the[ 
messages] into a new computer." To do just what you've said, i.e., just 
save for reference, all you need to do is to copy all your *.mbx files by 
whatever means you prefer: copy to USB drive, burn to CD, whatever. It 
could be handy to just save the entire %appdata%\Qualcomm folder, given 
Eudora's handling of attachments -- depending whether you customized where 
those go. That way, you wouldn't need to think about the .toc, .fol, 
nndbase, and so forth files that Eudora uses. But just preserving the .mbx 
and attachment files would work for the "save the content" mission as such.

However, it's possible that you don't mean just "saving," but somehow 
importing into a new program, so that your view of what you saved will be 
mediated by that program. Both Thunderbird and The Bat! can import from 
Eudora mail stores. The Bat! has a wizard to do the import, and you can 
find suggestions on importing into Thunderbird, see 
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_from_Eudora_%28Thunderbird%29.

Personally, I'd be inclined to skip importing, and just keep the content in 
saved files, especially if your Eudora files might not be "pristine" in all 
technical ways (cleaned, compacted, no orphan attachments, new .tocs, et 
cetera). But you may prefer otherwise. If at all possible, it is probably 
better (especially if you're not especially up on behind-the-scenes 
technical arcana of mailbox formats) to migrate from the old store to the 
new store on the old computer first, and only then to copy the new store to 
a CD or other medium, for transfer to the new computer.

Hope this helps. Your first step is to tidy up your Eudora by being sure 
you've cleaned, compacted, re-indexed, etc. Then burn every .mbx file you 
can find to a backup. Then and only then consider any migration.

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