So what have I lost? Not much, I guess, in the grand scheme of things. What had you said in the last month of email? Conversations with friends. Conversations with people who aren't friends. Mail lists, businesses, passwords from web-services. Notes. I tend to have some of my best ideas during emails. Bah.
It's not going to happen again. I'm not going to rush this, but I know that the first thing I want to do is get away from Outlook Express. I like it, as an app, but the messages database is monolithic and non-standard -- and that's where these problems started. So, first to go is OE. But how? MailConverter (readme) looks promising. It's working its way through the database now and apparently outputs in various formats, one of which simply must be useful. But what then?
Sod this client-side lark for a game of soldiers, I'm off. Perhaps IMAP is the way forward? Now this is going to take some investigation. I don't want to administrate the IMAP server myself; I'd like to use a service I can trust to be online the whole time and make regular backups. I want this server to check my various POP boxes for me and grab the mail. I want to be able to upload my current mail archives. I'm not sure whether these last two are possible, but I really need this. And I swear if there isn't someone who offers this already then I'll start a company to do it myself.
And what about my new email client? Well that's the joy of this IMAP thing. There are a million and one Mac email clients, but I needn't still to any of them. And if I can convert to and from all these different formats then I'm free, free at last.
Now, to find that utopian IMAP server...
So what have I lost? Not much, I guess, in the grand scheme of things. What had you said in the last month of email? Conversations with friends. Conversations with people who aren't friends. Mail lists, businesses, passwords from web-services. Notes. I tend to have some of my best ideas during emails. Bah.
It's not going to happen again. I'm not going to rush this, but I know that the first thing I want to do is get away from Outlook Express. I like it, as an app, but the messages database is monolithic and non-standard -- and that's where these problems started. So, first to go is OE. But how? MailConverter (readme) looks promising. It's working its way through the database now and apparently outputs in various formats, one of which simply must be useful. But what then?
Sod this client-side lark for a game of soldiers, I'm off. Perhaps IMAP is the way forward? Now this is going to take some investigation. I don't want to administrate the IMAP server myself; I'd like to use a service I can trust to be online the whole time and make regular backups. I want this server to check my various POP boxes for me and grab the mail. I want to be able to upload my current mail archives. I'm not sure whether these last two are possible, but I really need this. And I swear if there isn't someone who offers this already then I'll start a company to do it myself.
And what about my new email client? Well that's the joy of this IMAP thing. There are a million and one Mac email clients, but I needn't still to any of them. And if I can convert to and from all these different formats then I'm free, free at last.
Now, to find that utopian IMAP server...