Moving email from Eudora Windows to a Mac

Scot Finnie writes this article on Computerworld named “A Windows expert opts for a Mac life, Part 2″ where he describes his experience moving to the Mac. His biggest hurdle to move was the transtion of Eudora mailboxes, and he ended up doing a very labor-intensive process:

The only thing that worked was to open each mailbox (and in fact, all the Eudora data or settings files) in TextWrangler, convert the line ending to Mac format and then use TextWrangler to save the file. I came up with some shortcuts along the way, but in the end, after several days of trying other methods (including dabbling with AppleScript and other batch processes) I wound up opening up more than 1,200 mailbox files and putting each through a nine-click process to save it in the proper format for the Mac

I had the same problem back at MIT, where Eudora was the preferred client because of its Kerberos capabilities. But I moved out my email in a much less painful way, which I’ll describe:

1. Obtain access to an IMAP server with enough quota/space for all your files. In my case, I set up one on my own linux box at home.
2. Set up Eudora to connect to this IMAP server. Test that you can down load a message and that you can upload a message. Eudora allows to do these operations through the GUI, dragging the message item from a server folder to a local folder and viceversa
3. Once this works, drag all your local mailboxes to the server. Go, enjoy a cup of cofee, a bike ride or whatever… it will take a while, depending on the size of your mailbox
4. Set up the IMAP client on your new machine, connect to the server, test your settings, now drag all the messages to your local folders… Voila, you are done.