Escape from Claris Emailer
(With tribute to Rich Siegel who first used this title in a question on "emailer-talk")
By Paul Cook
OWC NOTE: Paul is an OWC Customer, and a member of our local Apple User Group, The NorthWest of Us. We thank him for this most excellent tutorial!
|
Claris Emailer is the golden handcuffs of email programs. It has a good user interface and it works well. But leaving Claris Emailer and getting your data out can be very hard to do. One might be inclined to simply stick with Emailer, but unfortunately Apple killed the program right after a deal with Microsoft. No more updates are expected, ever. So eventually you may need to move on to an OS-X native application.
Rant:
Apple kept the Emailer file format a secret. So getting your "stuff" out of it is a pain. No wonder Apple has only a few percent of the market, that lack of customer concern by itself is nearly enough reason to go elsewhere. (Death of the Newton, the eMate, OpenDoc, GX, etc. only added to the perception that choosing Apple will get you burned.) This might also be a good argument to use something, anything, other than yet another Apple email program.
P.T. Barnum said to have observed, "There is a sucker born every minute." Cook's corollary is that "suckers are recyclable." Election year politics proves this like nothing else. One can't help but fear that moving from Emailer to Apple Mail puts us in this same rather undesirable category.
Disclaimer:
This information is freely offered with out any warranty or obligation. Use it at your own risk. Any and all disclaimers of responsibility apply.
|
How We Did It:
Following is what worked for us. While we used this with Emailer, you may find a similar approach to be useful in moving between other email programs.
If you are going to use this as directions, we suggest that you read the entire document first and make sure that you understand it. In particular, we point out the disclaimer.
We had about 50k emails and attachments. If you only have a few emails, and if you never moved your Emailer folders, other solutions may work for you as well.
Moving the Emailer folders can cause big problems for attachments. Claris Emailer seems to store a path link to where the Downloads are. If you move this folder, particularly to another volume, Emailer may still think all prior downloads are in the same old place they were-even if that place no longer exists. They may be all together in the Downloads folder at a new location, but Emailer can't find them. Others have observed that this path link behaves similar to an alias in the file system.
Our Downloads folder had been moved many times and even put on a file server. And we wanted to import the old attachments. (Who wants to lose all those irreplaceable cartoons and funny pictures, etc.?) ;-)
First we tried direct importing into Apple Mail and the Address Book. That failed. Address book had no groups and Apple Mail was missing attachments.
When that failed, we hit upon importing data from Emailer to something else. If we liked the something else well enough, we might stay with it. We tried a number of well-known email packages as well as AppleScripts and other approaches. This is what worked for us.
Required Software:
- PowerMail (We used version 4.2.1 for OS-X, The demo works, but you really should pay them a few $$ unless you want the program to go away. Or better yet, try it. You may like it.)
- Emailchemy (We used version 1.5.6. You can try the demo first, but if you want to read the correct subjects, you will need to spend the $25)
- You may also need to be running Emailer 2.0v3.
- And, you need some kind of classic environment or Mac OS 8 or 9 to run Emailer, and of course, Mac OS X. (We used Panther v10.3.2)
First Things:
It would be a good idea to first backup all of your Emailer Files. You may also want to create a new user for test purposes and test it on this test address book and Apple Mail account first. That way, should anything go wrong, you could at least get back to where you started. Emailchemy suggest that you perform a "Typical Rebuild" of Emailer's database and you might as well do that now. To perform a "Typical Rebuild", hold down the option key when starting Emailer. Yes, this works in the Mac OS Classic environment of Mac OS X.
Importing Addresses and Groups:
There may be a bug in Apple's Address Book. It will import individual addresses fine, but has a problem with groups. To import groups, we first export the addresses and groups from Emailer in "ldif" format. We then use PowerMail to get them into Apple's Address Book.
To do this, we did the following:
Launch Emailer in either a classic environment or in Mac OS-8.x or Mac OS X.x.
From Claris Emailer, export the address book as an ldif format file.
Tip: It might be good to give it a name ending in ", ldif"
You may now quit Claris Emailer.
Quit Emailer and reboot in OS-X (Or if you ran Emailer under OS-X, then quit Emailer and the classic environment.
Import these addresses into PowerMail.
You might be inclined to choose Migration from Claris Emailer.
And that may work fine, however, we chose to instead use the ldif file we previously exported from Emailer.
To do this, select Address Book.
Then select "ldif file" and select the ldif file you exported from Emailer.
Look at the address and groups that you just imported into PowerMail.
Check that the addresses and groups imported fine.
Then export them into the OS-X Address Book.
To do this select "Database Export" under the "File" Menu.
Select "The Address Book" as the thing to export.
Select "Apple Address Book" as where to export it to.
Then select all the options in the "Synchronization with Apple Address Book options" unless you have reason to do otherwise. Select the "Go Ahead" button.
The Apple Address Book should now have all the addresses and groups from Claris Emailer. Verify that it does.
But don't get too excited! There were some features of the Claris Emailer Address book that are just not as easy as the new Apple Address Book.
PowerMail, like most email applications, seems to use an AppleScript approach to getting the old email from Emailer. Since Emailer no longer knows where the attachments are, due to the path problem, this won't work.
Importing Emails:
The big feature of Emailchemy for us was that it didn't try to follow the old Emailer paths to a Downloads folder that no longer existed. Instead, it looked for the Downloads folder inside of the Emailer folder. It also directly reads the Emailer mail database so it is much, much faster than those approaches that use AppleScript. (Emailchemy took less than an hour, while one AppleScript "solution" took 4 days and still didn't have most of the attachments.)
Carefully follow the directions for Emailchemy. The directions can be found at:
http://www.weirdkid.com/products/emailchemy/doc/index.html.
A quick overview is as follows:
Using the Wizard, select Claris Emailer 2.0 (Unless you are importing from something else.
Find the Claris Emailer Folder so that Emailchemy knows where to import from.
Tell Emailchemy to save the converted email in Apple Mail.app Folder format and select a location.
We were hesitant to directly save it directly to the home/library/mail folder in case something went wrong so we created a folder elsewhere and saved it there.
When it gets done, you will have to move the converted mail from where you had Emailchemy save it into where Apple Mail expects it as per the documentation.
If you had a lot of email, it may take a while to rebuild the database on the next launch of Apple Mail.
Clean Up:
The above worked very well, but there were still a few things one may need to do in terms of clean up.
Indexing:
Each time you open an imported folder, Apple Mail wants to index it. This can get in the way of doing any other cleanup you may have in mind. Rather than fight it, we chose to have it index everything, while we took a break.
To do this, expand the hierarchy of all the folders. (Click the right arrows and make them down arrows.) Then select all the imported folders. (Select the first one. Then with the shift button down, select the last.) Now go take a coffee break, your afternoon siesta, or whatever.
Modified Directory Structure:
In a couple of cases, we found that Emailchemy did not recreate exactly the same directory structure we had in Emailer. We had named some folders with leading blanks so that they would appear at the top of Emailer's mail folder list. These folders had both emails in them and subfolders with emails.
After import, we found a folder with the original name (including leading blanks) and subfolders, but no emails in the main folder. The "missing" emails were in a new folder having the name of the folder, but without the leading blanks.
Strays:
For some reason we had about a half dozen strays out of our original 50k or so imported emails. We don't know why. Maybe doing a second "Typical Rebuild" or something else would have fixed it. We found it easiest to manually stick them back into the mail folder they belonged in.
Emailer Sent Messages:
For us, one of the big advantages of Emailchemy over importing directly with Apple Mail, was that it looked in the downloads folder for all attachments and wasn't affected by our having moved the Claris Emailer Folder. It is also much, much faster.
However, attachments for emails in the Sent Messages folder are not in the Downloads folder. So attachments for sent messages are not preserved. (Unless you sent a copy to yourself, in which case they are in the in box folder.)
We didn't care. However, if you do care, you may use Apple Mail's import capabilities, to import just the sent messages folder.
Duplicate Addresses:
If you had duplicate addresses in your email address book, you may find that only one of them is present in the Apple Address Book. So if, for example, you had two contacts named "Mary Smith" in Claris Emailer, only one might make it into the Apple Address book. In our case, it appears to be only the last one.
The solution is to manually add the second under a slightly different name. For example, "Mary A. Smith" and "Mary B. Smith." This might have been avoided by changing one of the addresses in Claris Emailer prior to exporting it. However, we didn't discover it till afterwards and since there were only one or two, it was easier to just add them. Of course, if you read the entire document through prior first, as we suggested, you now know to look for this before exporting.
In our case, the duplicates were successfully imported into PowerMail, so we just opened both PowerMail's address book and the OS-X one and did a copy-paste from one to the other to recreate the missing addresses. This saved us from having to restart Emailer and a classic environment.
Other Approaches:
There may be other approaches that work, particularly under better conditions. (few emails, no moved Downloads folders, etc.) If you find one, great! We spent a week trying different potential solutions and this was the first one we found that actually worked.
We tried a number of other email packages, including some from a certain big-name company. But no other approach we tried got group addresses or got all the email attachments for us.
|