KMail offers an import tool for the messages and address books of some other email clients. You can access it using ->. Please make sure that you compact your folders in the other email client, no matter if you are going to use the import utility or if you are going to copy files manually. You only need to read this chapter if this tool does not work for you.
This section is for all of the users who need to move email messages
from their previous email client over to KMail. KMail can store its
messages using “mbox” or “maildir” formats, which
are the most widely-used mailbox formats on Unix-like systems. Mbox mailboxes
store messages in one file, identifying where messages start and end with a
From
line (do not mix this up with the
From:
header that contains the message's sender);
Maildir uses one file per message. For many Unix-like email clients, all you
must do is move your mailboxes to ~/Mail
(or make Mail
a symbolic link to the folder containing
your mailboxes), make sure they are writable by your user, and launch
KMail. The mailboxes should now show up correctly in KMail.
Please have a look at the Tools section of KMail's homepage first, to see if there is a tool that imports your mailbox and maybe even address book.
Do not use a second email client that accesses the files in
~/Mail
while KMail is running or
you might lose messages. This section only explains how to import mailboxes
to KMail once; it is not useful to you if you're planning to use several
email clients for your mailboxes in the future.
Eudora uses the mbox format in its mail
files. To use them with KMail, make sure that your
Eudora mailboxes have been compacted, then copy the
.mbx
files (Windows®
Eudora) or Eudora mailbox
files (Mac® Eudora) to your ~/Mail
folder. You do not need to copy the
index
files. Once you start KMail, the mailboxes should
appear in the Folders pane and the messages should be accessible in the Headers
pane.
If messages do not appear in the Headers pane, your mailbox files may still contain Windows® or Mac® line-feed characters. Use your favorite text editor, the recode command or a scripting language to change the Windows® or Mac® line feeds to Unix-like line feeds.
Mailsmith runs on Mac® and uses its own database format; however it is possible to export mail into mbox format using -> on a selected mailbox or on selected messages. Once the messages have been exported, translate the Mac® line breaks to Unix-like line breaks using your favorite editor, or using the following command under Linux®:
cat
mail-mac.txt
| perl -e 'while (<STDIN>) { s/\r/\n/gi; print $_ ;}' > mail-unix.txt
KMail will only recognize mboxes placed directly in the ~/Mail/
folder. This means that a folder hierarchy cannot be preserved by simply moving files into the
~/Mail/
folder, but will need to be reconstructed
within KMail manually.
This format is close enough to the mailbox format that KMail should be
able to use these mailboxes if you just copy them to your
~/Mail
folder; however, MMDF mailboxes
have not been tested with KMail, so your results may vary. If you can get
this format to work with KMail, please let us know so we can include more
specific directions in the next documentation release.
MH mailboxes are directories containing files that correspond to each message in that mailbox. A shell script to convert MH mailboxes to mbox mailboxes, mh2kmail, is included at least in the source releases of KMail, but maybe not in the packaged releases. Running this script on a MH folder will convert it to an mbox file. We strongly suggest that you back up your MH mail folders before you use this script.
In Agent:
Select the messages to export
Select ->
Mark the UNIX FORMAT and SAVE RAW boxes
Give File a .txt
extension and
save.
In KDE:
Move the previously-saved file to the correct ~/Mail
folder
Rename file without .txt
extension
When you open KMail the new folder with appropriate messages will be there.
If you are using Netscape® 4.x, the mail files should be found
in ~/nsmail
; if you are using
Netscape® 6.x, they're buried in a folder deep in the ~/.mozilla
subfolder, something like:
/home/user_name/.mozilla/user_name/2ts1ixha.slt/Mail/Mail/server_name
(the 2ts1ixha.slt
string will
probably vary, so check it on your own system.) The [...]/Mail/Mail
folder contains one
subfolder for each account from which you receive mail through
Netscape (for example, [...]/Mail/Mail/math.university.edu
);
you will need to copy files from each of them if you want everything to
be accessible under KMail.
If you have no subfolders, just copy all of the Netscape®
files to ~/Mail
, make sure
that they are writable (only by your user, of course), and restart
KMail: all of the messages will now appear in KMail folders.
(Note that if you use a command like cp
*
~/Mail
, you
should follow it with rm -f
~/Mail/*.msf
; every Netscape® 6
folder has a corresponding .msf
file, and if you
do not get rid of them you will have a bunch of spurious empty
folders.)
If you were using subfolders under Netscape® (for example, a main
folder called Work
with subfolders called
Jim
and Nancy
),
there are additional steps required. First, create the main folder
(Work
) in KMail and create a temporary
child folder under it (by right-clicking on the folder name and
selecting Create child folder); it does not
matter what you call this folder -- dummy
or the default unnamed
, for example. Once
a child folder has been requested, KMail creates a hidden folder
in ~/Mail
called (in this
example) .Work.directory
. You
can then copy your Netscape® subfolder files
(Jim
and Nancy
)
into ~/Mail/.Work.directory
,
and restart KMail; the child folders will appear under the main
folder Work
. Of course, this procedure may
be extended for sub-subfolders, to any depth. (You can remove the
temporary child folders afterwards, unless it amuses you to have a
Work
subfolder called
dummy
.)
Pegasus for win32 uses single files for Mail
folders similar to KMail. Pegasus mail folder files
have the extension .pmm
but they are the same format as mbox except the messages
do not start with the From
header, but with a control character. To work around
this, replace each instance of the control character with From
aaa@aaa Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 1997
. This From
line should be the first line of every message, before the
Received:
and other headers. Make sure to use a text editor
that lets you save the files in Unix-like format or create new folders in
Pegasus that are in Unix-like format and copy your messages
there.
Tools to convert these formats are available at the Tools section of KMail's homepage.
First you should have a look at Tools section of KMail's homepage if there are tools to convert your messages.
Mail programs not listed here or on the homepage probably do not work with KMail as they use
proprietary mail formats that KMail cannot understand. However, there is no
harm in trying! If the mailbox file looks similar to the mbox format, try
copying the mailbox file (remember, the index file is not needed) to your
~/Mail
folder and see what happens if you start
KMail. If you get mailboxes from your favorite email client to work in KMail,
please tell us how you did it so that we can include directions in a future
revision of this documentation.
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