Eudora 7.x to Zimbra

[rajahd]

Ok a little more info. Apparently there are more headers which are not hidden by default in Eudora when using the "view source" feature. If I click the button at the top of the message that says "blah blah blah" I can then see the content-type and other headers which were not showing before:

<Span CLASS=EUDORAHEADER>
X-MailScanner-From: adcouncil@quantitythrow.com<br>
</Span>
<Span CLASS=EUDORAHEADER>
X-UIDL: c!k&quot;!H;7!!5g]&quot;!5ll!!<br>
</Span>
<Span CLASS=EUDORAHEADER>
X-Antivirus: AVG for E-mail 7.5.441 [268.18.3/696]<br>
</Span>
<Span CLASS=EUDORAHEADER>
Mime-Version: 1.0<br>
</Span>
<Span CLASS=EUDORAHEADER>
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=&quot;=======AVGMAIL-45DDE1265707=======&quot;<br>
</Span>

I've found a PDF document on migrating Eudora to Exchange which claims you can't do the migration in Eudora due to Eudora's poor IMAP implementation (the document is a little dated though, referencing Eudora 6.x). It recommends using Outlook or Outlook Express to import the Eudora mail and then transfer it to Exchange. I'm going to try that only instead dump the mail into Zimbra IMAP folders. I'll report back how it goes.

If you think of anything else let me know. Thanks.

[rajahd]

Well this has proved to be a lot more complicated than I hoped but I think I'm getting somewhere. Numerous forum and blog articles on the net point to Eudora having a non RFC-compliant (read: bad) way of storing mail. Outlook has a Eudora importer but it's junk and doesn't deal with any of Eudora's idiosyncrasies - the result is nearly unusable mail.

There are several programs which convert Eudora mail to other formats and do a much better job of cleaning it up and preserving the format of the content. Aid4Mail, Trancend, and Emailchemy seem to be the top ones. After trying all 3 I settled on Emailchemy. It did the best job of converting my 5000 test e-mails and is less expensive to boot.

The process is not great but for 1 time conversions of 20 e-mail accounts it's livable. Basically you do the following for each account being converted:

1. Get rid of any e-mails you don't care about in Eudora (good time to clean house!).
2. Empty Eudora's trash folder and compact all mail boxes (if you don't do this deleted/moved e-mails may show up during the conversion).
3. Run Emailchemy and convert the Eudora e-mail boxes to it's IMAPServer type (this converts all the messages to RFC compliant internet messages in a structure that can be connected to from any IMAP client). Conversion of 5000 messages including lots of attachments took under 10 minutes.
4. Start Emailchemy's IMAP Server (this provides a local IMAP Server against the IMAP store just created).
5. Create an IMAP account in Outlook to point to Emailchemy's IMAP Server (Emailchemy provides all the settings when you start the server in step 4).
6. Create an IMAP account in Outlook to point to the appropriate Zimbra account.
7. In Outlook drag and drop folders/mail boxes from Emailchemy IMAP account to the Zimbra account.

This last step takes a while - 10 minutes for my test batch of about 100 messages with attachments but the messages looked perfect in Zimbra. For my 5000 messages I'm guessing it will run overnight but at least then I'll be rid of Eudora

Thanks to all for various comments and insights during this process. I hope this information helps others.

[dkarp]

Is there any chance you could put this summary in an appropriate place (for example, a new section called "Migrating from Eudora") on the Migration wiki page?

[rajahd]

I created an account on the wiki site but, having never participated in a wiki before, I didn't find it immediately intuitive on how to add a section. After I get through this migration I'll spend some time figuring that out and putting together a nice fully documented migration process I'll have more thorough information on additional issues by then too after migrating 20 or so people over.

For instance, another caveat I've discovered (and so I have it documented somewhere) using the conversion technique I described above is that Emailchemy does not like Eudora folders and mailboxes which have spaces or other extended symbols. To avoid problems, I recommend renaming folders and mailboxes in Eudora to use only underscores and alphanumeric characters prior to the conversion (step 1a essentially).

[gersh]

Need help configuring Eudora for the Mac (6.2.4) with Zimbra.

Can someone post a snapshot of configured Eudora settings for the IMAP protocol?

Thanks,

gersh

[rajahd]

gersh, I've never used Eudora on a Mac - does it not have similar IMAP settings windows to the ones listed earlier in this thread? If not I'm afraid I can't be of much help.

[rajahd]

Ok I think I have everyone transitioned over. I had followed the Zimbra Split-Domain:

$ zmprov md example.com zimbraMailCatchAllAddress @example.com
$ zmprov md example.com zimbraMailCatchAllForwardingAddress @example.com
$ zmprov md example.com zimbraMailTransport smtp:mail.example.com

Now I need to undo this but I can't seem to find definitive information how to remove these settings or if they need to be set to some previous/default value. Since the server is in production at this point I'd rather not experiment. Can anyone let me know what I need to do to stop forwarding unknown e-mails to another server?

TIA

[phoenix]

I believe there's several posts in the forums that tell you how to 'undo' those settings, you just add a null attribute with "".

[gersh]

Found my solution within Eudora's Settings. I did not scroll through the settings options far enough. Way at the bottom is a SSL setting window. I made the changes and now Eudora IMAP is screaming fast using the Zimbra server.

gersh

[rajahd]

I believe there's several posts in the forums that tell you how to 'undo' those settings, you just add a null attribute with "".

I never did find the other posts (probably just not searching for the right combination of terms) but your info was enough to undo the settings. Thanks man!