Posts Tagged ‘thunderbird’

When Did Thunderbird’s Account Setup Become a Pile of Poo?

It really is a sad day. I used to think of the main Mozilla projects, Firefox and Thunderbird, the pinnacle of open source. I’ve always recommended Thunderbird as a mail client to those who prefer not to use the web client available from their provider. I was extremely disappointed today when I had to help someone setup an email account on a server that didn’t use their domain name as part of the hostname of the mail server. I see what they are trying to do (and indeed, it made setting up my email account using mail.whatan00b.com as the server incredibly simple), but if one has to not use fairly predictable settings, said one is hosed.

The below screenshot is of the server info as detected by Thunderbird when I put my email address in:

Note that the outgoing mail server is a drop-down.. populated from.. where, exactly? Now, I realize that you can just go ahead and create the account and go back, but one can’t create the account without “re-testing” (validating) the config. So.. it has to be correct before creating it, but yet it won’t let me correct it. Yup, it’s that awesome.

Next, changing the protocol in the drop-down didn’t change the port number. When Thunderbird didn’t find the correct mail server (which is going to be the case almost every time when one’s email is hosted in a shared, hosted environment), Thunderbird automatically populated the protocol with POP. Not a horrible thing, but changing the port when changing the protocol seems like a pretty obvious thing to do in order to avoid frustration with users (and indeed would have helped with some frustration for us tonight).

The last frustration that we ran into was that when selecting the “Manual Setup” option, things weren’t quite so.. er.. manual. It was more like some automatic settings that couldn’t be overridden after clicking the manual frustration button. Since it defaulted to POP when it couldn’t figure out the server settings, simply hitting the manual setup button created a POP account.. Not so bad if you could easily switch the protocol. Of course, not so. To get that corrected, one has to remove the account, create a new account, type in your name and login info, let it try to figure out the settings for you, manually edit the settings to change the protocol, and create the account by hitting the “manual setup” button (intuitive, eh?). Then, you can finally edit the server name to put in the correct info. Ugh.

At the end of it all, I would still recommend Thunderbird to others from a usability perspective, but now with the disclaimer that it’s nasty to setup the first time if you don’t use a mail.domain.com or similar server. I just really wish that we didn’t have to sacrifice power and easy customizations for alleged ease of use.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Dec 29th, 2009

Migrating Mail from Zimbra Desktop to IMAP Server

The Zimbra Desktop mail client is a great mail client that gives the look and feel of the Zimbra Collabroation Suite, but the migration path out of the client has been less than easy. I wrote up a quick tutorial on steps that I took to help someone pull their email they had downloaded via POP into ZD and had gotten stuck there.

To do the export of the data, I used the built-in export utility inside of Zimbra Desktop. For the migration into an IMAP account (or a Zimbra Collaboration Server account) I used Thunderbird with the MboxImport enhanced add-on. I’m assuming you have already setup the account in Zimbra Desktop and pulled down the emails you want to export. I’m using Mac OS X to do the export, though it should work assuming you can get a file to extract the gzipped tarball from Zimbra Desktop.

First, I started with exporting from Zimbra Desktop. I went to the Account Setup page using the bottom on the top-right.

In the account setup screen, click on the account you want to migrate.

On the bottom-left, click on the Manage Data button.

Click on Export.

Type in the name you want to give the file, then click on Export.

Then you’ll be prompted to save the file. Save the file wherever you would like. Mine saved to my Downloads directory.

For some reason, it didn’t actually name the file the way it was supposed to when I downloaded it it, so I renamed the file to example.tar.gz and double-clicked it to extract. If you’re using Windows, 7-zip can extract the file.

When you extract the file, you can open the folder and find directories for each folder of the mail you had. Inside those folders, there will be .eml files for each email. If you have more than 500 messages in a folder, the export breaks them up into multiple folders and append a number to the end of the name.

Now we’re ready to import into Thunderbird. It’s useful at this point if you account is setup already, but not necessary. First, we’ll have to create a temporary local folder to import into. Right-click on the Local Folders in Thunderbird and click on New Folder. You can name it whatever you like, it will be cleared out eventually anyway.

Then, select the new folder we created. Then, in the Thunderbird menu, go to Tools -> Import/Export in mbox/eml format -> Import all eml files from a directory -> also from its sottodirectories.

When prompted, navigate to your extract Zimbra Desktop export directory and click Choose.

The utility will import your messages into the temporary directory.

Depending upon the server that you are using, you may have to be careful with drag-and-dropping your messages into your IMAP account. You can do it, but beware: it may mess up timestamps on messages. For Zimbra we have a little trick we can use. When setting up the account, simply append “/tb” to the end of your username. For my example, my email address was example@whatan00b.com, so my username that I used to authenticate was “example@whatan00b.com/tb”. Once you know how about the consequences of drag-and-drop inside your mail client, just drag all of your messages into their appropriate folders. Here’s my messages now in the Zimbra web client:

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (11) : Nov 3rd, 2008