Archive for the ‘Message Conversion’ 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 »

Converting Large Filing Cabinets from AOL to Gmail

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Every so often we hear from a potential customer who has been using AOL for ten or fifteen years and has a very large personal filing cabinet. They are concerned about whether ePreserver can convert AOL to Gmail with such a large filing cabinet.

The answer is yes, and a customer recently sent us a screenshot to prove it:

95000 messages converted from AOL to Gmail
95000 messages converted from AOL to Gmail

This is the summary screen after ePreserver completed, showing that over 95,000 messages were converted to Gmail. Because the customer had a slow Internet connection, this took almost two days, but ePreserver completed the conversion successfully.

Posted in AOL, ePreserver, Message Conversion | No Comments »

Converting Multiple Lotus Notes NSF Files

Monday, December 14th, 2009

I am commonly asked how to use Address Magic Enterprise PLUS to convert Notes to Outlook archive, an address book, and a server-based mailbox are all in different NSF files. The solution is to provide a separate conversion path between each source and destination.

Most users want to do the following conversions:

  1. Convert the Lotus Notes names.nsf file to the default Outlook Contacts folder in the Exchange mailbox.
  2. Convert the Lotus Notes a_xxx.nsf archive file to a PST file on the user’s local hard drive.
  3. Convert the messages and calendar in the Lotus Notes server-side mailbox to the Exchange mailbox.

Performing these three conversions requires the following three command lines:

Addrload nsf pst
Addrload -mrv nsf:server!! pst
Addrload -mv nsf Archive.pst

The first command converts the names.nsf address book, the second command converts the server-side messages and calendar, and the third command converts the Lotus Notes archive to a PST file in the default Outlook data directory.

You would normally place all three command lines in a batch file so that they will be run all together.

Address Magic Enterprise PLUS provides the flexibility you need to convert Notes to Outlook, supporting virtually any required mapping from folders to mailboxes or PST files. You can also convert to files on file servers, non-default contacts folders, PST files at a particular path, or non-default mailboxes.

Posted in Lotus Notes, Message Conversion, Outlook | No Comments »

How to convert Thunderbird to Outlook

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

I’ve seen many questions about how to easily convert Thunderbird to Outlook. There are several “free” solutions that require no money but do require large investments in time, comprising drastic steps like sending everything out to the Internet and copying it back, or setting up a server and manually copying a folder, or even more complicated ideas.

Not only are these strategies time-consuming, they also require significant technical prowess. Many people just want a simple way to get it done.

Address Magic Personal PLUS makes it easy to convert your address book and email from Thunderbird to Outlook 2003, 2007 or 2010. It takes four clicks to copy your email and another four clicks to copy your default address book. You can see screen shots for how easy this is:

Address Magic Personal PLUS Screen Shots

By following this short wizard, all of your email is copied. Your folder hierarchy is maintained, your messages are transferred with the urgency, dates, read/unread indicator, and other flags. Large files are supported with no difficulty; 2-GB mail folders are routinely transferred at up to 300 MB/minute.

Address Magic also takes care of putting everything in the correct folder. For example, the Thunderbird “Sent” folder is converted to the Outlook “Sent Items” folder.

There are two folders that aren’t converted. The “Trash” folder is ignored. If you want to convert your trash, then copy the contents to another folder. The “Unsent” is not converted so as to prevent messages from being sent by both Thunderbird and by Outlook.

To transfer your default address book from the Thunderbird Personal Address Book to the default Outlook Contacts folder, run Address Magic again and choose to convert Address Books. You don’t need to choose the folder names in this case – Address Magic automatically handles using the correct default folder in each email application.

You can learn more about using Address Magic Personal PLUS to convert Thunderbird to Outlook.

If you have more than 50 users, you should instead use Address Magic Enterprise PLUS.

Posted in Message Conversion, Outlook, Thunderbird | 1 Comment »

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 »