This article is for Macintosh users who are switching their email from Eudora to OS X Mail. Other articles in this series cover switching to Thundrebird and various Windows email options.
Switching to Mail
Apple's Mail is already installed on your Mac if you are running OS X, so no installation instructions are necessary. There are a couple of problems you will want to address, though, before you launch the program and start filling in all of your settings and importing your email and addresses from Eudora.
Before you first open Mail
One of Mail's shortcomings is that its "import" function for mailboxes, addresses, and nicknames from Eudora 6.1 is, well, far from perfect. Though Mail imports Eudora's mailboxes and their contents pretty easily, all of the mail that you import will be marked as "unread" and, what is much worse, much of it is dated with the import date rather than the date sent or date received. This will make it very difficult for you to construct a chronology of events based on emails, or even to read old emails on a given topic in chronological order.
Another problem is that some of your nicknames and address book entries will not make it over into the OS X Address Book, where Mail stores such things.
Fortunately, most of this can be fixed quite handily with a third-party utility, Eudora Mailbox Cleaner 4.2.2, which you can download free from the Internet. So before you transfer you try to transfer your data using Mail's import function, pay a visit to
http://homepage.mac.com/aamann/Eudora_Mailbox_Cleaner.html
and download the program.
The file that you download will be a disk image file, "EudoraMailboxCleaner.dmg." Double-click this to mount the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner 4.2.2 disk image on your desktop. Once mounted, it looks like an external disk drive icon. In the disk image's directory window you'll find a Read Me file (read it!), the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner application, and two Applescript files: FixNicknames and ActivateFilters.
The Read me file tells how to run the application, which in turn runs the two Applescripts, but these are the basic steps for OS X users:
- If Eudora or Mail is running, Quit it.
- On the desktop, select the Go menu and choose Home.
- In the Home window, double-click the Documents folder.
- Click on the Eudora Folder and drag it over the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner application icon.
- Watch Eudora Mailbox Cleaner do its stuff.
Eudora Mailbox Cleaner will import your addresses, nicknames, and group nicknames into the OS X Address Book and bring your Eudora filters and mailboxes (and their contents) into Mail, with most sent and received dates intact. All imported mail will be marked as "unread," but that's fairly easy to fix in Mail.
Setting up Mail
Now that your mailboxes and addresses are in order, go ahead and start Mail. You'll be prompted to input your settings (email account name and password, POP and SMTP server names, etc.) -- just open your old Eudora, look at your settings there, and use those same settings for Mail. (While you've got Eudora open, go to the Checking Mail section of Settings and uncheck all of the boxes under "Connection." That will keep Eudora from automatically retrieving any more of your email from the server, should you happen to open the program again.)
Next, go to the Mail menu and select Preferences. Take a look at the settings in all categories. In the General category you'll tell Mail how often you want it to check for new email. Also pay particular attention to the Junk Mail and Signatures settings. For Junk Mail, use the default settings (all checkboxes checked) except for one: instead of the default "Leave it in my Inbox, but indicate it is Junk Mail (Training)," select "Move it to the Junk mailbox (Automatic)." That way you'll be able to look in the Junk mailbox to easily view a list of all incoming mail that's identified as junk, and then select it all and delete it. In the Signature category, just input your default signature and any alternate signature that you use. One more setting that's particularly important is "SSL," without which you will have trouble retrieving your email. Toward the top of the Account category, click Advanced. At the bottom of the window you will see a checkbox labeled "use SSL." Make sure that box is checked.
Once you have entered all of your settings, close the Preferences box and take a look at Mail's mailbox window. The main part of the window is a list of the email messages that are in the mailbox you are viewing (probably "In" to start with). There's also a narrower list coming off the side of the main window, and that's where your mailboxes are listed. Below Mail's default mailboxes (In, Out, Drafts, Sent, Trash, and Junk), you'll see an "Import" folder. That's where Eudora Mailbox Cleaner put all of your old Eudora mailboxes. Click the triangle pointer beside the Import folder to see what's inside. Any folder that has a pointer next to it contains other folders, but any folder that is blue and has no pointer is actually a mailbox.
Since you've never read any of this imported email with Mail, it's all marked as "unread." You can either leave that as is or fix it like so: Select an imported mailbox in the list and type Command-A to select all of the mail in the box. Now Control-click one of the selected emails and look at the menu that pops up. Select Mark --> As Read. Now do the same with every other mailbox that you have imported. If you've imported a lot of mailboxes, you may decide it's not worth the trouble -- and you may very well be right.
If you want to continue using your old mailboxes in Mail, you can now click and drag them out of the Import folder and into the list below the Junk folder. If you've been thinking about renaming or reorganizing your mailboxes, this would be a good time to do it.
When you've finished with the mailboxes, you're ready to go! With a Shift-Command-N (Get New Mail under the Mailbox menu), you can use Mail to retrieve your email.
UCD Campus Spam Filtering
UCD has a program called Spam Assassin that tests all of the email going to ucdavis.edu email addresses to identify and tag suspected spam, but it doesn't do anything with the suspected spam until you tell it what to do. You have three choices: (1) do nothing and you'll just keep getting the spam; (2) have it deleted at the campus mail server and you won't get it at all; or (3) have it stopped at the campus server and stored. In this case you will receive an email once a week that summarizes all of the spam in case there is something legitimate that you want to retrieve.
You can make your choice by going to
http://security.ucdavis.edu/spam.cfm
Toward the top of the page in the middle under Campus Spam Filtering, click on "Set up campus spam filtering now." You'll have to put in your username and password. Scroll down to the bottom of the page that opens up.
The default choice is the first one listed on the webpage. All the spam will be sent to your email account and you will have to rely on your email program's spam filters to catch it.
The second option is to receive an email once a week summarizing your spam. Then you can glance through the list and retrieve the items that you want. If you choose this second option one thing you have to remember to do is go into Geckomail periodically and delete the messages in the UCD-spam folder. If you don't, your email account will fill up and people won't be able to send you anything anymore.
The third choice listed is to have the spam deleted and never even delivered to your email account. You also have to check the box that says you understand that you may lose desirable mail. Once it has been deleted, you can't get it back.
Even if you activate the campus spam filters, you will still receive some spam -- it won't catch everything. In fact, the campus spam filters are very conservative because they don't want to stop legitimate email. So if you activate the campus spam filters, make sure that you also make use of the spam filters that come with your email program.
To access geckomail go to
Any questions?
OS X Mail has a thorough Help feature (under the Help menu, where else?) that should answer most of your questions. If you're still stumped, feel free to call Jim, Damon, Claudia, or Blaine with any questions or difficulties and we'll do our best to help.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Jim Coats
ANR Communication Services
Phone: (530) 297-4445
Fax: (530) 297-4438
Damon DiPietro
ANR Communication Services
Phone: (530) 297-4433
Fax: (530) 757-5731
Claudia Myers
ANR Communication Services
Phone: (530) 297-4444
Fax: (530) 297-4438
Blaine Sullivan
ANR Communication Services
Phone: (530) 297-4440
Fax: (530) 297-4438