My work machine is an Apple iBook. I didn’t choose it, so, Ade, I’ll have less of your “It’s a proprietary operating system on proprietary hardware.” I have to set up PGP or GPG for domain registrations and what not. I figured it would be easier to do using Thunderbird and Enigmail than trying to do it with Mac Mail, it would also give me the opprtunity to move to Thunderbird, which I had always planned to do anyway.

My problem was that I had 6 months of business emails tied up in the Mac Mail format. I noticed that Thunderbird could import from Eudora and Eudora could import from Mac Mail, so I tried this, but not only was Eudora horrible to use, but also it didn’t import my mail. Fortunately I found a little tool that would allow me to copy all of my mail from Mac Mail into an mbox file, which I figured I could then import into Thunderbird, or at least convince Thunderbird that it was my mail spool for an account. This didn’t work either, but I did find a way of tricking Thunderbird into thining my mbox was one of it’s own mailboxes, by renaming the mbox to the name of one of the Thunderbird mailboxes and copying it over the top.

So I got my mail into Thunderbird eventually, but it was a hassle. And I found Thunderbird on my smallish iBook screen to be not much fun to use and theres is only an old version of Enigmail for OS X so I went back to Mac Mail. I have since found some instructions on a better way to use GPG with Mac Mail so I will try again. Shame though, it would have been OK on a larger screen.

The point of this though, is why can Thunderbird only import from Netscape 4.x and Eudora? Surely mbox and maildir would be easy to implement and although harder, wouldn’t Mac Mail and Outlook/Outlook Express/Entourage import wizards make it easier, for those entrenched in the main competing email programs due to the need to keep existing important emails without needing to fire up another app, to move their mail over to Thunderbird? Surely this wouldn’t be a big engineering task. If I was a good enough programmer I’d do it myself. If I was rich enough, I would pay someone who was good enough to do it. Will you do it for me? Please?