I get lots of mail, perhaps because I'm on a number of mailing lists. While I no longer put up with the dual-boot blues on my laptop but simply run Linux as my primary operating system, I do run Windows under VMware to read my mail with Eudora. That situation came about as a quick solution to a simple problem I had over a year ago.

Like many people, I started out reading my mail on Unix systems using mail clients such as mh and xmh, and then shifted to Windows-based clients such as Eudora or Netscape Messenger. When I got a new laptop about a year ago and decided to run Linux on it, I found that I could not abandon the large amount of mail I had built up under Eudora. So I installed Windows under VMware, copied my Eudora files over, and still had access to my accumulated mail. I also have a tape somewhere that contains all the mail I had accumulated under Unix from years before.

However, the time has come to move to a Linux-based mail client. This month's article will explore ways to read your mail under Linux and still access all the mail you have accumulated under Eudora, Netscape Messenger, or even some of the Outlook variants.

The problem

I have accumulated over 60 MB of mail in the last few years, all locked up in Eudora's mailbox files. Those files have .mbx extensions and sit in my Eudora directory, one for every mailbox I have created under Eudora. If you created mailboxes in folders, then you will also have some .mbx files in subdirectories in your Eudora directory. You might also have noticed that Eudora creates a .toc file for every .mbx file. Those .toc files help Eudora maintain various flags associated with each message in the mailbox file.

Netscape Messenger, on the other hand, keeps your mail in files without an extension, one for each mailbox. It also keeps an .snm file for each mailbox. It uses those files to keep flags and other information associated with each message. Messenger keeps .snm files in the directory \Program Files\Netscape\Users\default\Mail if you have only one user on your PC and have chosen the default. Depending on how you set up Netscape, you may have names other than default in the path above.

Outlook express keeps its mailboxes in the directory \Program Files\Outlook Express\Default User\Mail and also keeps two files for each mailbox, one with an .mbx extension and the other with an .idx extension.

The question then is to get all the mail from each of those mail clients into Linux so we can use them

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