Posted on Jul 13th 2008 by matt.
Today we released the Emailchemy Memory Boost app, and I’m hoping it helps people deal with some of the gigantic email archives they’ve been writing to me about.
I originally designed Emailchemy to run in as little memory as possible, simply because at that time most computers had 32MB total of RAM. And, being that I was writing Emailchemy in Java, I had to be extra careful about how much heap space (“working memory”) Emailchemy required. This presented a specific requirement to not load an entire email message into memory for processing, because even back then, an email could be 10MB or larger with big attachments and most computers at the time would have choked under that weight. So, Emailchemy was designed to process the contents of an email in chunks, and it was able to run and convert any email in under 6MB of memory.
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Posted on Feb 28th 2008 by matt.
Just got a kind note from Mike, a Mac user, saying that Emailchemy was the only Mac-based method he could find to convert his Windows Outlook PST file to Mac OS X Mail. 1GB in 20 minutes, not bad at all.
Anyway, he wrote to also report another quirk in Mac OS X Mail’s import feature. I say “another” because I’ve already noted (and reported to Apple) a few others. The issue he reported was that when importing mbox folders in Mail 2.0 format (Mac Mail .mbox folders are not the same as standard mbox files), Mail will import all the folders but some folders that are deeper in the hierarchy have all their messages show up blank. Mike reported that importing mbox folders in the Mail 1.0 format worked fine, however.
The problem with the Mail import bugs (I’m not calling them quirks anymore) is that they are often hard to reproduce and there may only be a few other users who ever see this issue.
This is why I recommend using Emailchemy’s embedded IMAP server (the IMAP ImportServer tool) if you can. It bypasses the import wizard by providing you a desktop mail server that you download your converted mail from. It’s as simple as creating a new email account and downloading the mail.
Aside from the bugs in the import wizard, I like using Mac OS X Mail. It’s what I’ve been using for the past several years and I haven’t seen anything else I like on the Mac yet.
Posted on Feb 20th 2008 by matt.
Today I noticed we had a few customers, Mac users using Mac OS X 10.5.1, who reported odd behavior until they installed the Mac OS X 10.5.2 update.
So if you’re using the latest Emailchemy (v 9.6) and Mac OS X 10.5.1, and you are seeing things like missing file dialogs or conversions that seem to never finish, try installing the 10.5.2 update from Apple.One note on installing Mac OS X updates: I am a Mac user too, and I’ve noticed that with my Macs that I have increased system stability if I install the “combo” update instead of the “incremental” update that comes through the Software Update app.
I can’t explain why, but after I’ve re-installed the “combo” update (available from the Mac OS X Support downloads page) over the Software Update update, most “odd” system issues disappear.
