Archive for the ‘Address Magic’ Category

Converting Email to iPhone/iPad

Monday, December 12th, 2011

A customer wrote today to ask, “How would I get my email onto an iPad?” This is a great question because the answer is not obvious.

The short answer is that you don’t. You get your email onto whatever the iPad syncs with, and then the email will magically appear on your iPad (or at least some of it will, depending on how far back you sync.)

The iPad has three different ways to sync email.

POP3. If you use POP3 to access your email, then you are out of luck because POP3 doesn’t “synchronize” with the server. Instead, POP3 downloads the messages and deletes them from the server. Also, POP3 has no folder management.

IMAP: If your iPad connects to your email with IMAP, then your ipPhone or iPad will automatically sync with the IMAP server. If you need to get your mail from your current email client to an IMAP server, you can use Address Magic Personal PLUS to convert from numerous different email clients directly to IMAP.

ActiveSync: ActiveSync is like IMAP. Your iPhone or iPad will automatically sync with an ActiveSync server, you just need to get your email onto the server.

There is one special case and that’s Gmail. You can connect your iPad/iPhone to Gmail using POP3, IMAP, or ActiveSync. The best choice is to use ActiveSync because it will also sync your contacts and calendar. If you are using Gmail, then configure your iPhone or iPad to connect to Gmail with ActiveSync and your messages will automatically appear. If you are not using Gmail and you want to switch to Gmail, you can use Address Magic Personal PLUS to convert from numerous different email clients directly to Gmail.

 

Posted in Address Magic, Email Applications, ePreserver, iPhone, Message Conversion | No Comments »

Migrating to the Exchange 2010 Personal Archive

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

Many of our customers migrating to Outlook and Exchange want to migrate the data from the old mailbox, but don’t want to fill up the Exchange mailbox with old email. Historically, the only alternative was to put the data in a PST file on the user’s computer and then open the PST file as a second message store in Outlook.

However, PST files have numerous deficiencies. They have no retention policies, they cannot be searched, they are difficult to gather for litigation support, and they are subject to total loss if they aren’t backed up. In short, their only advantage is that they are cheap to create since most users have disk space to spare.

Address Magic Enterprise PLUS added support for converting to the Exchange Personal Archive. For example, the command line to convert Thunderbird message to the Personal Archive is as follows:

addrload -m tb pst:@PA

The downsides to Personal Archives are as follows.

  • They are not available through ActiveSync or BES, so cannot be viewed on smartphones.
  • They do not appear to work with Hosted Exchange. (So far, we have not been able to make this work at Connected Software.)
  • They cannot be opened in Outlook 2000 or Outlook 2003.

However, unlike PST files, Personal Archives can be viewed from Outlook Web Access (OWA.)

More information from Microsoft about the Exchange Personal Archive can be found at:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd979795.aspx.

 

Posted in Address Magic, Message Conversion, Outlook | No Comments »

Why are mbox dates converting wrong?

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

I received a problem report from a customer today that Address Magic Personal was converting the dates in his mbox file to the wrong time in Outlook, but that the dates transferred correctly with our competitors’ products. It’s a rare day that our competitors do a better conversion than we do, so I took a look at the data. The first line in the mbox file (the “mbox time”) looked like this:

From ozt@test.com  Sat Jan 18 19:15:01 1997

You’ll notice that there’s no timezone on this line.  For other dates, such as the sent date and the SMTP received date, the timezone is included. For example:

Date: 18 Jan 97 16:08:00 +0100

Since the mbox line doesn’t have a timezone, Address Magic uses the local timezone. This customer was in a different timezone from where the mbox file had been created, so the dates were transferring with the wrong timezone. You might think that copying the timezone from one of the other lines would make sense, but in fact that is usually wrong because SMTP servers can be anywhere in the world.

With Address Magic Enterprise mbox conversion, you can use the command line parameter “-i IgnoreMailboxDate=1″ to force Address Magic Enterprise to ignore the “From ” line, but this choice does not exist with Address Magic Personal. The workaround is to change your system timezone for the duration of the conversion.

The reason that our competitors’ products worked was that they ignored the mbox time and instead used the last “Received:” time. Since this customer was using webmail, the “Received” time matched the mbox time and so appeared to produce the correct date. In fact, the date would have been wrong for anyone who used POP3 instead of webmail.

There are actually three date fields in an mbox message (which includes Netscape and Thunderbird.) “Date” is the date that the email was sent. “Received” is when the message passed through a particular SMTP server. The “From “ line before each message is the date that the email was written to the mbox file, which matches the Outlook “Received” date (which is NOT the same as the mbox “Received” field.)  There is no way to have Outlook display the “Received” date from the SMTP server.

If you’ve gotten the impression that determining dates is complex, you are right. There are other problems, such as rounding versus truncation, that make it a complex task to determine exactly why any two dates do or don’t match.

Posted in Address Magic, mbox, Message Conversion | No Comments »

Does the software work?

Monday, December 7th, 2009

The biggest question we get from our customers is, “Does your software work?” Converting some of the formats we support, such as AOL, is exceptionally difficult.The answer is yes, it works, and it works well. If it didn’t work well, we wouldn’t ship it. We’ve actually removed features from the products when they haven’t worked well for our customers.

We’ve spent twelve years making our software the best it can be. We sell our software to the government, the Fortune 500, small business owners, and many, many home users. We are a small company and keeping those customers happy is why we’ve been here for twelve years.

Does our software always work? The honest answer is that because of viruses, damaged system configurations, hardware failures, and other problems beyond our control there are some situations where our software does not do what you want it to. That’s true of any software you buy, and that’s why we offer an unconditional money back guarantee. The difference between us and most software companies is that we’ll give you a refund even if the problem isn’t our fault.

Posted in Address Magic, ePreserver | No Comments »