..idle writings from an idle mind..

so, this whole move-to-the-mac thing has been fun and games. one of the problems i’ve stumbled across is with using mozilla thunderbird as my mail program, and then expecting that i can do things like sending photos from iphoto, using the system address book + other nice integrated features that make a computer, well, useful.

after hitting brick wall after brick wall, i figured i should find out what it is i need to do to make it all work — after all, buying a computer and then not being able to use it properly isn’t much fun. turns out the problem is actually with thunderbird; you can’t use any applescript functions to hook in to thunderbird directly. something to do with it being a “carbon” app rather than a “cocoa” app, whatever that means. in real terms, here’s an example of the problem this creates; iphoto has no way of pushing photos as attachments in to a new message in thunderbird, as it accomplishes this feat with applescript.

so, moving to apples’ mail.app is looking good (read: necessary) at this point. if i’d had known how painful the procedure was going to be, i’d have had second thoughts.

here’s what i’ve had to do to get it all working:

• locate thunderbird mbox files on disk, copy to a new folder.
• attempt import in to mail.app, fail badly.
• figure that if i compact the folders in thunderbird first, it might work better.
• attempt import in to mail.app, fail badly.
• google search, realise that thunderbird’s idea of implementing the mbox format is shaky at best, and inconsistent at worst.
• maybe there’s a way around this problem? google search, locate some applescripts to assist with import — see macosxhints for more info.
• run the “mbox cleaner” script over the unimported mbox files.
• attempt import — all messages show up properly.
• run the “status fixer” script to set read/replied tags properly on mail. got it mostly right. god it took a while.
• start to reorganise mail, set up filters, realise that there’s a bunch of duplicate messages still from the import.
• find some more useful-looking applescripts here and there – the first one looks moderately useful, the second one just looks cool.
• run script… which takes forever, and doesn’t find duplicates that span multiple folders. oh well. manually delete those.
• i need my <ctrl>+<return> shortcut for sending a message. unfortunately, there seems to be no way to use the <return> or <enter> keys in user-defined keyboard shortcuts. if anyone knows how to make such a shortcut, i’d love to know about it.

so, mission and a half — but the effort appears to be worth the results. i’m pretty happy with the way everything turned out, though i guess i’ll have a much better idea of what i think of mail.app after using it for a couple weeks.

i suspect that moving everything like i did may have been easier if i was using a set of imap folders … transfer mail from thunderbird to imap server, transfer out of imap server and in to mail.app. oh well, lesson learnt i guess.

~ z.