Friday, September 16, 2005

Migrate from Pegasus Mail to Thunderbird

I finally took the plunge and migrated my mail from Pegasus to Thunderbird.

Unfortunately this was not as straightforward as I had hoped. However I did find a relatively simple solution.
  1. Go through your mail and delete any messages that have large attachments. This will speed up the process greatly.
  2. Copy all your message folders (*.PMM) to a machine that is running *nix. Messages are located by default at C:\PMAIL\MAIL\yourusername\
  3. Download the following file pmail2mbox.c and then compile it.
    gcc pmail2mbox.c -o pmail2mbox
  4. Place the result pmail2mbox file in the same folder as the PMM files.
  5. Change to that directory then run the following command.
    for mailbox in `ls *.PMM`; do ./pmail2mbox -s $mailbox; done
  6. This will convert all the mailboxes into mbox format.
  7. All you need to do now is copy the resulting files into the Thunderbird mail directory. e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\4zhmyze7.default\Mail\Local Folders
Fire up thunderbird and all your new messages will be displayed. There's a little bit of tweaking to be done, like copying the copiestoself messages into the sent folder.

You'll need to migrate your signature as well. Create a text file in c:\program files\thunderbird\ that contains your signature. Select Tools -> Account Settings -> the name of the account on that screen you can then point to your signature file.

8 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Please help:
How do you not end up with hundreds of stupidly named mbox files like PMH7HG6.mbx ?

4:33 am, November 13, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Easy to use, good idea

1:15 pm, March 28, 2008  
Blogger Unknown said...

This code does not compile:

bruce@Herodotus:~/scratch/PMAILstore/ADMIN$ gcc pmail2mbox.c -o pmail2mbox
pmail2mbox.c:14:26: warning: missing terminating " character
pmail2mbox.c:14: error: missing terminating " character
pmail2mbox.c:22: error: ‘created’ undeclared here (not in a function)
pmail2mbox.c:22: error: expected ‘,’ or ‘;’ before numeric constant
pmail2mbox.c:22: error: stray ‘\’ in program
pmail2mbox.c:24: error: stray ‘\’ in program
pmail2mbox.c:24: error: stray ‘\’ in program
pmail2mbox.c:24: error: stray ‘\’ in program
pmail2mbox.c:24: error: stray ‘\’ in program
pmail2mbox.c:24: error: stray ‘\’ in program
pmail2mbox.c:30: error: stray ‘\’ in program
pmail2mbox.c:30: error: stray ‘\’ in program
pmail2mbox.c:30: error: stray ‘\’ in program
pmail2mbox.c:33:3: warning: missing terminating " character
pmail2mbox.c:30: error: missing terminating " character
pmail2mbox.c:98:15: warning: missing terminating " character
pmail2mbox.c:98: error: missing terminating " character
pmail2mbox.c:99: error: stray ‘\’ in program
pmail2mbox.c:99:25: warning: missing terminating " character
pmail2mbox.c:99: error: missing terminating " character
pmail2mbox.c:101:13: warning: missing terminating " character
pmail2mbox.c:101: error: missing terminating " character
pmail2mbox.c:102:34: warning: missing terminating " character
pmail2mbox.c:102: error: missing terminating " character
bruce@Herodotus:~/scratch/PMAILstore/ADMIN$

2:00 pm, February 10, 2010  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The posted pmail2mbox.c file won't compile as downloaded because it seems to have some linewrapping artifacts.

If you have programmed any language you should be able to load the code into an editor and work out which lines have been wrapped and rejoin them.

There are about 30 or so of them. If the OP still monitors this thread, I've now got a copy of pmail2mbox.c that compiles and am happy to post it back.

4:07 pm, March 20, 2011  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Works perfectly!
Thanks a lot!

4:47 pm, July 26, 2017  
Blogger Toby said...

Hi, Do you still have this code? The original place I hosted it has died, pre GitHub days. Some people are still interested in it.

7:07 am, August 26, 2019  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Could be very useful

2:19 am, September 05, 2019  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi, When I try to download the C file, I get a permission error.

1:05 pm, August 19, 2022  

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