I’ve been on Pegasus Mail for ages. It’s OK, but not open source, and I’ve always had the vague fear that some day my email will be locked away due to a format change. In addition, its HTML handling is not the best, and the way it does multiple accounts is a little weird. Finally, it was getting slow on my Windows XP PC due to the file system - and migrating it from one PC to another is a pain, especially if you’re changing the drive the data lives on.
So I resolved to move to Thunderbird. I started from here: www.techspot.com/community/topics/how-to-convert-emails-from-pegasus-to-thunderbird-format.17806/
and here: fixunix.com/mozilla/420484-pegasus-thunderbird-import-problems.html
and when I did the MBox method, it seemed to work fine. Until I looked at the folder on Thunderbird and saw more messages than I’d counted on.
It appears that Thunderbird uses “\n\nFrom .*\n” to filter its messages. Ok, but Pegaus doesn’t quote the From in “From the editor:” which appears at the start of the line in some of my messages. Argh! This left me with lots of messages split in half, with weird dates and strange subjects / from / to lines.
I hacked up the following awk script, which I put in a file called peg2tbird: /^From / && ! /\?\?\?\@\?\?\?/ { printf ">%s\n", $0 } !(/^From / && ! /\?\?\?\@\?\?\?/ ) { printf "%s\n", $0 }
This takes any line that matches “From ” but doesn’t match “From ???@???” and puts a > in front of the From. All other lines it leaves as-is.
Then I ran: \cygwin\bin\gawk -f peg2tbird < unx01234.mbx > tbird-mbox-file
Then I copied tbird-mbox-file to my Thunderbird Profile directory (in Mail\Local Folders).
This makes the messages look a little strange in Thunderbird - they look like “>From the editor:”. Also, some messages ended up showing with today’s date - inserted by Pegasus. (I think it was just those generated by a virus checker, so they were probably less well-formed than real messages.) Sigh. Oh well, that’s good enough for me to get my old messages migrated.