embedded images

After 25 years I'm considering the switch from Eudora to Pandora. It's mostly because of the UTF-8 character and HTML rendering problems, but also because I'm worried about upcoming certificate issues that I luckily haven't yet encountered but expect to arise.

My email archive, which I will want to import, is huge; over 650,000 messages plus embedded images and attachments; a total of 67,000 files in 118 directories taking 23 GB.

I understand that Pandora, like Eudora, allows attachments to be stored separately and in multiple directories, which is critical. But how does it store embedded images? Eudora puts them, as separate files, into one giant "Embedded" directory. Mine currently has over 28,000 files, which is unmanageable, and I know many have gone missing over the years. Does Pandora have a better solution?

LenShustek wrote:After 25 years I'm considering the switch from Eudora to Pandora. It's mostly because of the UTF-8 character and HTML rendering problems, but also because I'm worried about upcoming certificate issues that I luckily haven't yet encountered but expect to arise.

My email archive, which I will want to import, is huge; over 650,000 messages plus embedded images and attachments; a total of 67,000 files in 118 directories taking 23 GB.

I understand that Pandora, like Eudora, allows attachments to be stored separately and in multiple directories, which is critical. But how does it store embedded images? Eudora puts them, as separate files, into one giant "Embedded"  directory. Mine currently has over 28,000 files, which is unmanageable, and I know many have gone missing over the years. Does Pandora have a better solution?

Pandora has separate options for saving attachments and inline images.  The default is to save the item as part of message.  Attachments and images also have separate options for sent and received items.

I have chosen to save files and inline images as part of the message.

I do not know what the Pandora structure look like when messages/images are saved as files.  I would suggest trying out Pandora to see how those options are implemented.  Be sure to set the personality to leave mail on server during the experiment.

I suggest when importing the message into Pandora not to do everything at once.  Start off with one folder and a few mailboxes to get a feel for the import process. Then scale up or down the size and number of messages imported at one time.

Butch

I tested moving my 5GB Eudora archive to Pandora this week. I decided to keep all images in-line and avoid cluttering up my Pandora attachments folder by turning off the Pandora "Store received attachments as files" setting . After using the Pandora import wizard I still had many files in the attachments folder - presumably in-line images that Eudora had stripped from the emails. Worse still several emails had not been imported correctly, and some in-line images showed as unavailable.

I changed tack, and used the old "Aid4Mail Mbox Converter" 1.6 freeware product (no longer available from Aid4Mail, but still findable on the web). This BRILLIANT product allows you to convert Eudora *.toc files back to *.mbox files. It re-inserts any attachment files back into the MBOX files. I then used the Pandora import wizard to import these files as Unix Mailboxes.

Result: I have all my Eudora emails moved to Pandora with in-line images preserved; my Pandora attachments folder is empty, and all emails and embedded images seem to be fine. Oh, and it worked an order of magnitude faster than simply using Pandora to import Eudora emails directly.  I did hit several Pandora bugs by trying to import Eudora folders with special characters in their names. Definitely want to rename any Eudora folders with single-quotes and other special characters first.