Strategies for testing and migration Eudora to Pandora

I've run across Pandora as a possible replacement for Eudora 7.1.0.9.  I was hopeful for the Hermes effort, but it does not appear to be going anywhere.
From what I've read here, it seems that Pandora is not file-compatible with Eudora.  Posts talk about "import".

I already run Eudora with a separate data folder structure from the executable.  

Code:

start "Eudora" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Eudora\Eudora.exe" "C:\Data\Internet\Mail" "C:\Data\Internet\Mail\Eudora.ini"

The ideal situation would be to install Pandora in a new program folder and just point it to the data directory. "C:\Data\Internet\Mail"
If that is not possible, what are the options for evaluation and test, and the process for returning to Eudora without loss of mail if a "show stopper" is found?

What processes have others used that to safely migrate from a complex Eudora system with decades of mail history?

timg11 wrote:I've run across Pandora as a possible replacement for Eudora 7.1.0.9.  I was hopeful for the Hermes effort, but it does not appear to be going anywhere.
From what I've read here, it seems that Pandora is not file-compatible with Eudora.  Posts talk about "import".

I already run Eudora with a separate data folder structure from the executable.  

Code:

start "Eudora" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Eudora\Eudora.exe" "C:\Data\Internet\Mail" "C:\Data\Internet\Mail\Eudora.ini"

The ideal situation would be to install Pandora in a new program folder and just point it to the data directory. "C:\Data\Internet\Mail"
If that is not possible, what are the options for evaluation and test, and the process for returning to Eudora without loss of mail if a "show stopper" is found?

What processes have others used that to safely migrate from a complex Eudora system with decades of mail history?

Keeping the executable modules in a folder separate from the data structure is a wise plan.  Keeping the Pandora data separate from the Eudora data is also wise and probably necessary.

Pandora using a different file structure than does Eudora, however, Pandora includes a tool to import Eudora files.  I recommend you develop a importation plan that divides the task into small components.  Then, I would convert a small group of mail files to get a feel for Pandora.  Once you are comfortable, then begin converting more mail files.

My conversion plan was to have Eudora to leave mail on the server for 7 days.  Pandora was set to leave mail on the server and never delete the mail.  I would use Eudora to check mail followed by having Pandora check the mail.  I read and acted on the mail using Pandora and Eudora was for backup.  All along I was importing more Eudora mail files but after a couple of days with everything imported, Pandora became my mail client, I quit using Eudora, and I never looked back.

Butch

Thanks! From the install instructions, there is no mention of data vs executable folders. It simply says "6. Specify a folder in which to install Pandora, then click Next."
That appears to be the executable folder, I ran the x64 installer and it offered "C:\Program Files\Pandora"
I completed the installation, then created a new folder for data: "C:\Data\Internet\PandoraMail"
You would recommend installing it, then importing a few accounts and a few folders to try it out? I have about 25 accounts, and several hundred folders in Eudora.

Your technique will address loss of incoming mail in Eudora by keeping it on the server (although I believe that doesn't work for POP access to gmail accounts) .
If I were to start sending email from Pandora and have to go back to Eudora, is there any way to transfer those messages?

I'm going to have to pay before I fully evaluate Pandora, so I did the buy now and paid on Paypal.
Now what?  I have not received any email with serial or registration in an hour or two?  Is that a manual process that Brana has to do?

Edit - serial number was received and registered a few hours later. Thanks!

Welcome to Pandora forum timg11. Import Personalities first, Filters last, and as Butch suggested - just start using it for daily tasks and make a gradual transfer along the way.

I'm trying to import as much as possible but keep Pandora offline and continue using Eudora until I've checked things out fully.
I have 213 mailboxes in 22 folders.

I imported accounts, contacts and labels. When I tried to import filters, I get a warning about creating mailboxes before importing filters.
I was just going to work with one account as a test, but that doesn't seem to be an option with the importer.
So I started the import of messages. That seems to be copying folders and mailboxes, although it is going to take a while apparently. It's been running for 20 minutes with about 5% progress on the green bar.

One important use case I have is to transfer my email environment between machines. I run Eudora on a desktop normally, but I sync the data files to a notebook when I travel, then sync back when I return.
Since Eudora has a separate data folder from executable, and all configuration files are in the data folder, this works well. I have scripts to "check out" and "check in" Eudora to the notebook, which verify Eudora is not running and then uses Beyond Compare CLI mode to mirror the data folder from one machine to the other.

Can I use the same strategy with Pandora? Are there any bits of configuration or state stored in a place other than the main data folder that would also need to be synchronized?

Wow, the message importing is going to take a _really_ long time. After 2 hours, it is 15% done. Pandora is using only 20% of CPU, and disk activity is very low.

When I'm finally ready to cut-over from Eudora to Pandora permanently, will I have to do this again? I don't see any evidence of a "just import messages that are not already imported". Is there a way to do that?

Another possible concern - As the importer's run time is approaching 6 hours and is now about 40% complete, my Eudora is still running, so new messages are going into the mailboxes. How will that affect the import process into Pandora?

OK - it's the next day and the message import has completed.

I closed the importer dialog. I see a process called mailboxcat.exe is using 25% CPU,     peaking to 100%. It is interfering with interrupts, causing missed and dupliteddddddddd  keys while I'm typing.  (left the errors in this line to show what I mean)  
Still seeing continuous network traffic to e1-bmr.ycpi.cha.yahoo.com frooooooomis ppppppppprocess

1) folders are under Import - will have to be moved eventually.
2) the Inbox contains all messages that wwwwwwwe filtered and moved to other folders.  I guess I need to "compact" mailboxes in Eudora and try import again?


Is there any special proceeeeeeess to reset for another import try. Just delete the Import folder and all below it?

I restarted to try and get the system running properly again. The Mailboxcat.exe process started up again. Apparently it is a service, so I went into Services and shut it down for now.
Now my keyboard and mouse operation are normal, and CPU use is back to the normal background.

This is a high performance i7 4GHz system with 48 GB RAM. I use it for audio and video production. I can't live with a process that interferes with the low level system interrupts such as keyboard handling - I haven't even tried to see what happens with audio or video recording and playback.

Has anyone else seen this type of issue?

Around April 2021 I did the importation from Eudora to Pandora. It kept going and going, so I let it run overnight, and after at least 18 hours (not measured precisely) I was considering cancelling the import but it finally completed. Retrospectively, it took so long because in Eudora I had more than 2,800 folders, roughly 300,000 messages, and 800 or more filters, which may act as a guide. This was with the data being imported from the C:\Eudora folder to the C:\Pandora folder on a fairly fast NVMe SSD drive and an 8-core AMD Ryzen CPU with 32GB of RAM, if that's any guide.

I kept running Eudora and Pandora in parallel for three months or more, I finished up having a LOT of trouble with folder names, since in Eudora I had used folder names that Pandora did not allow and/or could not handle.

Unlike Eudora, it turned out Pandora -- and I had no way of being ware of this, as a new Pandora user -- folder names cannot contain any characters that Windows will not allow in its folder names, and I had an assortment of such folder names here and there spread throughout Eudora. Furthermore, even though a "dot" is allowed on Windows folder names, the Importing Witcher did not handle these, so that Eudora folder names such as somewebsite.com would be imported as somwebsitecom [the dot is missing].

It took some months for me gradually to come across some of these folder name issues, both the folders themselves and also because of problems with some of the filters, here and there, that depended on the mishandled folder names.

With so many folders and filters, these troublesome mismatches did not all come to light right at the beginning.. Anyway, all that out of the way after 5 ir 6 months, and with a couple of bugs caused by having some many folders being foxed by Brana, I'm now a happy and contented Pandora user who's benefiting from Pandora productivity features that Eudora will never get.

@Tony Austin, thank you very much for the insights.  I'm preparing for another run at importing after deleting the prior Pandora installation. I have a similar large number of archive folders.

I do have a number of special characters in my folders, so I can modify these while in the Eudora environment to avoid forbidden characters to make sure they are imported correctly.
I currently have underscore _ hyphen - and plus + in folder names. These seem to be allowed, but please confirm if you have successfully imported folders with those characters. I use a prefix of _ to control sort order in the mailboxes tree, moving certain folders up. It is a shame that dot is not allowed. I have folders for standards, like IEEE802.11, IEEE802.15, and so on. Eudora handles them by creating a folder name "IEEE80211.fol" rather than "IEEE802.11.fol" which is also a legal folder name in Windows since LFNs were introduced in Windows 95.

Please tell me how you were able to run Pandora and Eudora in parallel?  The inbox and other folders should be workable through Leave Message On Server settings, but it seems that the outboxes would get out of sync. Did you find a way to re-import or merge the outbox from Eudora when you were done running parallel?



Here's my attempt to document the allowed folder characters fully and completely, since these forums appear to be the working documentation for Pandora.

Code:


Dec  Char     Dec  Char     Dec  Char      
---------     ---------     ----------      
 32  SPACE     64  @         96  `          
 33  !         65  A         97  a          
 34  "         66  B         98  b          
 35  #         67  C         99  c          
 36  $         68  D        100  d          
 37  %         69  E        101  e          
 38  &         70  F        102  f          
 39  '         71  G        103  g          
 40  (         72  H        104  h          
 41  )         73  I        105  i          
 42  *  NO     74  J        106  j          
 43  +         75  K        107  k          
 44  ,         76  L        108  l          
 45  -         77  M        109  m          
 46  .  NO     78  N        110  n          
 47  /  NO     79  O        111  o          
 48  0         80  P        112  p          
 49  1         81  Q        113  q          
 50  2         82  R        114  r          
 51  3         83  S        115  s          
 52  4         84  T        116  t          
 53  5         85  U        117  u          
 54  6         86  V        118  v          
 55  7         87  W        119  w          
 56  8         88  X        120  x          
 57  9         89  Y        121  y          
 58  :  NO     90  Z        122  z          
 59  ;         91  [        123  {          
 60  <  NO     92  \    NO  124  |   NO    
 61  =         93  ]        125  }          
 62  >  NO     94  ^        126  ~          
 63  ?  NO     95  _        127  DEL NO    


G'day timg11. Firstly. I should point out that I run MailWasher (from Firetrust of New Zealand) for overall spam control of incoming messages, and always eyeball what's on my mail server before reading the messages into my mail client, Eudora or Pandora. I very highly recommended using it, see MailWasher PRO or MailWasher FREE versions. Disclosure: I have no business relationship with Firetrust, I'm just a paid user who finds it to be a fantastically useful  product.

After migration and for the first six months or so of Pandora usage in parallel, I set Eudora to Leave Mail On Server (LMOS) mode, set via the properties of EACH of the multiple personalities in Eudora. Then whenever messages were read into Eudora the messages remained on the mail server (and thus were still visible in MailWasher). In Pandora I set the personalities NOT to LMOS mode.

Each and every time, ss soon as the messages were read into Eudora I made sure  to read them immediately into Pandora (and they would disappear from MailWasher, since they had been removed from the server). Now the messages were retained in Eudora (as a fall-back measure, "just in case") while I was able to handle them in Pandora.

If, for whatever reason. I sooner or later discovered that some mail folder was missing from Pandora, I would make a copy of the Eudora mailbox file (let's say it was called Invoices.mbx) and would then rename that folder to UNIX-compatible MBOX name (in this case Invoices.mbox). Then I could use the Importing Witcher to migrate that missing mailbox into Pandora, which you'll have to work out yourself how to dom but the following screenshot starts it off:



Major problems were resolved in the first moth or two, but a few minor ones appeared later on (rarely-used mailboxes that were hidden amongst my more than 2,800 mailboxes). I ran in parallel mode for maybe six months or longer, then stopped reading mail into Eudora and now keep Eudora only as an archive.

Right from the start I committed to eventually using only Pandora, and didn't ever want to keep the outboxes in sync.

You have to bite the bullet at some stage. Let me assure you that I'm very content with using Pandora. To this day I,m following the discussion group about the Eudora e-mail client for Microsoft Windows forum (mailing list) and am immensely grateful that I'm no longer suffering the enduringly painful Eudora limitations! I have no desire at all to switch back to Eudora.

Pandora has a swag of useful/jazzy features that Eudora users can only dream of. A key point is that Brana Bujenovic regularly adds new features. He also  promptly fixes any bugs. (Back in the "good old days" I remember having to wait many months for Qualcomm to fix Eudora bugs.)


FOOTNOTE:
Regarding valid characters in mailbox names, see forum thread https://pandoramail.forumotion.net/t167-mailboxes-not-imported-properly-from-eudora

@Tony Austin, thanks for the further details and tip on renaming Eudora mailboxes to Unix type to re-import at a later time.
I managed to import all my messages except archives overnight.
Then there was a manual process of moving them from the Import folder to the correct position in the tree, and copying the contents of In and Out since they don't replace the empty ones, but change to In_1 and Out_1.

Once I had imported everything else, I tried importing filters - the most important part of Eudora.
Unfortunately that failed. I posted another thread on the details.

Apparently you were able to send from Pandora well enough to not have to worry about outbox sync. If Pandora is unable to support my filters, then I'll have to stick with Eudora until it is.

So I guess I'll go back to using Eudora as primary for another week, with the plan of wiping all PandoraMail data and trying the import process again once I get the filters import issue sorted.