Balsa succumbs to termites

[worker201]

Hello everyone, just got back from a 3-month trip to Africa and India, and I didn't use Linux once the whole time! So I'm kinda having to relearn a bunch of things, and deal with old problems as if they were new problems.

I don't know why I still use this damn program, but I have my email all set up for Balsa, and it would be virtually impossible to get all my folders moved over to something more usable, like Thunderbird. Anyway, I keep getting this error:

[lholcombe@holcombe2 ~]$ balsa
opening Inbox..
done, msgcnt=0
Unhandled property: 318 word-wrap
Unhandled property: 320 -khtml-nbsp-mode
Unhandled property: 322 -khtml-line-break
Unhandled property: 12 border-collapse
Unhandled property: 51 letter-spacing

HtmlCss-ERROR **: file cssmatcher.c: line 1317 (css_matcher_apply_rule): should not be reached
aborting...

If I use pine to access my email locally (/var/mail/lholcombe), there are no worries, and I can just delete the offending piece of mail. After deleting the message in pine, balsa opens just fine. One thing that seems out of place is the reference to khtml. I don't use Konqueror or KDE at all, so balsa must have its own internal khtml engine - that's my guess.

Any suggestions?
Including ways to make the switch from balsa to some other program a little less painful?

Thanks

[Void Main]

Doesn't balsa store it's mail in "mbox" files like most other mail apps? If so it should be trivial to copy them into whatever other mail app you want.

[worker201]

Trivial?

Ok, then, how is it done? Say I want to use Thunderbird from now on. How do I get my sentbox, inbox, and etc. in there?

[Void Main]

Well your inbox should just be available no matter what mail app you use (if you are talking about /var/spool/mail/username which is also in mbox format by the way). I think you'll find your mbox files from balsa (draftbox, sentbox, trash, etc) in your subdirectory /home/username/mail. After you install and configure Thunderbird you will have a subdirectory "/home/username/.thunderbird/somerandomestring.default/Mail/Local Folders". Shut down your mail programs and copy the mbox files you want into that Thunderbird directory (don't copy over files with the same name, copy them to new names if necessary). Fire up Thunderbird and you should see the mail folders you copied.

Personally, I use Evolution but only because it can connect to Exchange servers. I use IMAP to connect to my Linux mail servers. Then everything is stored on the server and no matter what mail app you use you can connect using IMAP and have access to everything. I don't store any mail locally.

[worker201]

K, that worked for most of the folders. However, there were 2 folders of saved messages that Thunderbird doesn't seem to like: 'mbsystem' and 'amanda'. Both have the same heirarchy - the main folder has three subfolders, 'cur', 'new', and 'tmp'. Here's the output from one of the 'new' folders, since it has the shortest list of contents:

[lholcombe@holcombe2 new]$ pwd
/home/lholcombe/.thunderbird/o7fh1zd8.default/Mail/Local Folders/mbsystem/new
[lholcombe@holcombe2 new]$ ls
lholcombe-5495-0:2,S lholcombe-5527-0:2,S
lholcombe-5495-1:2,S lholcombe-5527-1:2,S

Balsa has no problem reading these messages, but Thunderbird shows the folders to be empty. I'd kinda like to get all these messages working in just one email program, since using 2 makes no sense.

Since we are currently not using Exchange or IMAP, I figured I might as well support my favorite project, Mozilla. In the end, choice of email programs is somewhat arbitrary, usually.

[Void Main]

Don't copy the subdirectories. Just copy the files in them into the "Local Folders" which should allow Thunderbird to read them. Then create the subfolders you want in Thunderbird and move the messages into them from within Thunderbird. Should work.

P.S. Most all mail clients work with IMAP, including Thunderbird. I think you would prefer it if you have more than one client and you want to be able to access all of your mail from anywhere. You could also run a web front-end on it (like squirrel mail or imp) so you could optionally get to your all of your mail from a web browser from anywhere on the net. I just can't live without an IMAP server.

[worker201]

I had heard from on of our IT guys that they were switching to IMAP at some point, but I guess they haven't yet, since I haven't heard anything yet.

[worker201]

After copying the files directly into the 'Local Folders' directory, Tbird is reading them as separate directories with no contents. This is getting weird.

[Void Main]

Hmmm, well I don't really know anything about balsa. I did install it and copy the files from ~/mail which worked for me but I don't know how you created your folders in balsa or if the files in them are in mbox format. I can't actually figure out how to create a folder in balsa, there is an option for it on the edit menu but it doesn't seem to do anything for me. Assuming these particular folders are not in mbox format I would suggest creating new folders in balsa in mbox format and copy the messages from the non-mbox folder to the mbox folder then copy those associated files to Thunderbird's local directory. If that doesn't work, maybe you could send me a sample of a file you are having trouble with (maybe create a new one and put a couple of test messages in it). You can ftp it to this site (put it in /uploads).

[worker201]

Things seem okay now. I guess they weren't actually folders but mailboxes. I probably made them in MAILDIR format, not knowing any better. The solution turned out to be making new mailboxes in MBOX format, and then moving all the messages into the MBOX boxes. That way, dragging them into Thunderbird was a comparative piece of cake.

[Void Main]

The solution turned out to be making new mailboxes in MBOX format, and then moving all the messages into the MBOX boxes.

That's exactly what I suggested in my previous post. :)