Something weird or wonderful about email

Factual Questions
1

Okay, this is probably such an unlikely string of events it doesn’t apply to anyone else, but I’m amazed about it.

Back in March my Eudora email program stopped working. (Due to my running a really old game, Crystal Caves, but never mind that.) I was unable to get it running again – I reinstalled the program from the dled file, installed a newly dled alter version, etc. several times. No Joy. At best the program would open and run, but I was never able to get it to import or open the old mailbox. And I had a looooot of stored up email.

Finally I gave up, and switched over to Thunderbird.

In November I replaced the computer, and out of stubbornness I moved all the old Eudora Mailboxes to the new one. I dled Thunderbird to the new computer and started afresh.

Yesterday, I wondered if maybe Eudora would work on the new computer. Downloaded, installed, ran – and it had automatically imported (?) all the mailboxes and mail from my current Thunderbird version. Hmmm.

I found the import command and pointed the new Eudora at the folder of old mailboxes. About eight minutes laters it had successfully imported all my beloved old stored mail. Yayyy!

Okay, I figured I’d keep both programs. I rather like Thunderbird now so I’ll keep using it for current mail, and I’ll just use Eudora when I need to excavate older messages. Fine. Picture me happy.

So, this morning I open Thunderbird and THERE ARE ALL THE OLD MAILBOXES under a new folder labeled ‘EudoraImport.’

Huh? How does Thunderbird magically have all those messages when it didn’t before???

I’m not complaining, using a single program is more convenient, but it just seems weird that installing one program and importing data into that magically also puts it into another program.

2

Since this is basically a computer question, I’m going to move this from MPSIMS to General Questions, where the IT experts there might have an answer for you.

Ellen Cherry
MPSIMS Mod

3

Okay, if you think that’s better, thanks.

4

Eudora and tbird box use the unixy “mbox” format to store mail. They can read each others locally stored mail. Tbird has some importer built in.

5

I’m not sure I follow. Is the situation that Thunderbird and Eudora each have a set of mailboxes, and both programs automatically display both sets of mailboxes?

Or, I dunno, is there some folder that holds all the mailbox data and messages, and both programs use that same folder? Like, oh, a data base with two different indexing programs?

I’m guessing if the latter is the case, I should make damn sure I never have both programs running at the same time.

6

it’s the latter. and i don’t think you should worry about running both at the same time (although, why would you?) - lots of files are accessed by different programs at more or less the same time - like when you download a song with one program and start listening to it with another one, before it’s finished.

7

Well, I was thinking of a situation where I stupidly make different changes to the same mailbox with both programs running at the same time – like that might screw up saving the mailboxes on exit.

Anyway, yeah, likely won’t happen now that I don’t ‘need’ Eudora to get at the old messages.