weird kid software

Enough people have trouble with importing email into Outlook or trying to create PST files that we felt it necessary to give an explicit walk-through of detailed instructions. We’ve also been experimenting with answering tech support requests with video “screencasts”, so I’m putting them both in this post for future reference.

Outlook has many advanced features and the user interface presents many different ways to perform any given task, but the problem is that not all results are consistent. After much experimentation, we’ve found a sequence of actions that will work in most circumstances.

The screencast starts with the act of converting Entourage email, but you could substitute the converting of any supported format. For example, you could use these instructions to move a standard mbox file into Outlook, too, as a general way to convert mbox to PST files.
… Read more

Some people have written in confused about why Emailchemy converted so many more emails than their Inbox was showing. While perhaps alarming, it’s not cause for concern. To say it simply, Emailchemy extracts deleted messages from many email storage formats, and if you don’t want that to happen you should use the “Compact Mailbox” or “Compact Database” feature of your old email application before doing the conversion.
… Read more

Here’s a walkthrough I recently sent to a customer who had questions about how the Google Apps Uploader works. I’m posting it here for future reference.

1) Using either the “Conversion Wizard” or “Advanced Conversion” tool in Emailchemy’s toolbox, convert your mail to Standard mbox Format, giving it a name like “converted”.

2) Switch over to Emailchemy’s Google Apps Uploader tool, select the “converted” folder and enter the target email account’s address (the account that you want to receive the uploaded messages) and leave the default settings for the other options for now.
… Read more

In Part 1, I explained how the “Date:” header of an email is actually the “sent date” and introduced a couple of issues with how the sent date is created by different email clients. Now in Part 2, I’ll give a similar rundown of the problems with the received date, starting with a nod to the the title of this series of posts by telling you there is no such thing as a received date.

That’s right – it doesn’t exist. The format of all Internet mail, as it goes over the wire (or over the air, whatever) is specified by RFC-2822 – the standard Internet Message Format. It defines the structure of a message, including the various header fields you may be familiar with, like “From: ” or “To: ” or “Subject: ” and many more that you may never see. The point here is that RFC-2822 does not define a header field for a received date, and this is a problem because then every email client application is free to interpret and create a received date pseudo-header which may not map to any other email client’s interpretation.

For example, Mail for Mac OS X uses the date found in the top (last written) “Received:” header as a received date. It’s a novel approach because it doesn’t require the injection of proprietary non-portable headers like “X-Received-Date:”, but the date it is using is when the last mail server in the delivery chain received the message. Specifically, it is not the date that the email recipient saw or even read the message. The email could have a received date of today, even if you don’t check your email for the next week!
… Read more

There is no such thing as a “received date”. Not in the standards, anyway. Is this a quibbling technicality? An omission?

Nope. And I’ll tell you why. Why? Because the date of a message matters. It matters more than it probably should, with the advent of email forensics, being that the date is inconsistently defined across email clients, and being that it is easily forged. Still, the date of a message is good enough for most purposes, as long as you understand what it means and where it came from.

First, let me tell you that the “Date:” header field in the RFC-2822 header of every message is the “origination date” field. From section 3.6.1 of the specification:

“The origination date specifies the date and time at which the creator of the message indicated that the message was complete and ready to enter the mail delivery system. For instance, this might be the time that a user pushes the “send” or “submit” button in an application program. In any case, it is specifically not intended to convey the time that the message is actually transported, but rather the time at which the human or other creator of the message has put the message into its final form, ready for transport.”

… Read more

I think the title says it all, but the problem is bigger than that. The whole idea that the last 3 or 4 letters of a filename are an indication of underlying file format and structure is flawed. More than flawed, it’s wrong, but 3 decades of MS-DOS (yes, it’s still part of Windows) and its usability nightmare known as filename extensions is hard to overcome.

Interestingly, I don’t blame Microsoft for this particular confusion though, since it was Apple that broke the generally accepted, or de facto, standard in this case.

With the release of OS X, Apple introduced a new kind of file — or really a folder that acted and looked like a file to the user — called a package. The idea was that the insides of certain folders were only for system usage and should be hidden from users. For example, applications and all the various libraries and resource files and executables were packaged into a .app folder. To the end user, this .app folder looked and acted like a standard file and it could be double-clicked to launch the application. Early versions of Mac OS X even hid this package extension from the user, but to this day, to see the contents of a package, you have to “right-click” or “control-click” on the package and select “show package contents” to see what’s inside.
… Read more

Outlook PST files have a very complicated internal database structure, which is read from and written to probably thousands of times every day, and they tend to be quite large. The combination of these characteristics, combined with the fact that Outlook and Windows do crash every now an then, makes the Outlook PST file somewhat susceptible to data corruption.

It can be random, and you may not even notice it right away, but even if a single bit gets flipped from a “0″ to a “1″ in a PST file, you could lose messages or the ability to even open the PST file in Outlook.

How do you know if a PST file is corrupt? There are major tells, like if Outlook tells you, for example, when you try to open it, or, if Outlook crashes when you try to open a particular message or open a particular folder in the PST data. But sometimes it is more subtle, like you may discover messages or attachments have disappeared, search no longer returns any results, or you can’t move messages in or out of the PST file. These are the cases that you may not notice in normal day-to-day use, but when you want to export your email from Outlook PST files with a utility like Emailchemy, you just might.
… Read more

Someone recently wrote in asking how to recover email from a corrupt Entourage Database file and then how to get the email into a new version of Entourage. Specifically, the asker had a file that Entourage 2008 could not import or upgrade from an earlier version, and he had tried all the various methods of rebuilding that Entourage provides. Here is my answer to him, which I thought others would find useful too:
… Read more

Emailchemy’s Google Apps Uploader tool gives you the option of selecting a few different kinds of automatic labeling. If you select “Full Hierarchy”, then the entire folder hierarchy (path) will become a label. Gmail uses these labels for faking IMAP folders to an IMAP client. The other is to select “Each Subfolder”, which will break apart the path string into individual labels, so “/2004/work/project_x” will become 3 separate labels: “2004″, “work”, and “project_x”.

Which to use? I like both. That way, you get to preserve the original hierarchy and still have the flexibility of “tags”.

I’m not sure exactly which update did it, but Entourage has lost the ability to double-click import Entourage archives (.rge files). I for one found this feature very convenient, but that’s probably because I’ll import tens of archives in a single day when I’m testing a new converter. Still, it made it easy to describe the migration steps to customers moving to Entourage: “Convert and Double-click!”

No more.

I tested this with RGE files created by Entourage itself as well as RGE files created by Emailchemy, and every time Entourage 2008 would open when double clicking the RGE file, but no import. I now have to import using Entourage’s Import Wizard, which works, but just isn’t as fast or convenient.