μblog: engineering from the trenches

One of my colleagues was experiencing some problems with Microsoft Entourage and wanted to switch to Mozilla Thuderbird but had to also transfer the “local folders”. Entourage was crashing every time the email login was entered and would not permit us to copy the local files to an imap server in order to retrieve them inside Thunderbird. After much searching, I found that if the folders under Local Folders/Documents are simply dragged onto the desktop, or any other folder in that case, the come up as .mbox files and conform the mailbox standard. These .mbox files could then be directly copied to the Local Folders section of the Thunderbird profile (~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/x.default where x is something random). The .mbox suffix was then removed and a .msf file was created for each of the directory files using a script. The .msf file only display information and does not need to be specific for each file. Thunderbird was then restarted and all of the copied folders appeared under Local Folders.

This may seem trivial to most people that use Macs on a regular basis, but I figure I should document this for the one person who may end up in my position lacking substantial OS X experience.

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