Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???

Subject: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: Mr Red
Date: 10 Jun 20 - 04:50 AM

The GF uses Livemail (Win7) which was set up for IMAP (because she has 3 TABs). Livemail is unsupported and unreliable in Win10.

Sticking keys means she has bought a new Win10 Lenovo. And soon she will want to transfer contacts etc and it seems the best e-mail client (for the purpose & the person) is going to be Thunderbird. There may be better apps but it WILL be Thunderbird. So:

A quick search tells of .csv files but her Livemail - er basically, doesn't. If it could, it would generate 56 fields, TB limits on less than, so deleting empty columns first is advocated.

.iaf files are offered. And possibly vCard. And there will be .pst files, apparently, buried somewhere in subdirectories thereof. eg the best Mozilla advice found

Any other thoughts/experience on transferring, at least, contacts & settings?

TIA

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: Newport Boy
Date: 10 Jun 20 - 05:41 AM

I know nothing of Livemail, but many reliable sources on the web detail how to export contacts to a .csv file. Are you sure this isn't possible?

Don't worry about numbers of fields. When you import into Thunderbird, you simply mark the fields you want to import and link them to relevant Thunderbird fields.

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: Joe Offer
Date: 10 Jun 20 - 06:06 AM

I use Outlook, and I'm now switching from the Web-based version to Microsoft 365 because my mailbox is going to be overfull in a matter of days.

But I've always heard people speak of Thunderbird in hushed and reverent tones. What is it about Thunderbird that's so remarkable?

I take it that Livemail is one of the many Microsoft variations of MSN, Hotmail, Outlook, and Live.com. All of these are Web-based email clients, and they all leave your email on the server until you reach the storage limit (despite all my efforts to delete stuff, I have used 134.85 GB of my 15 GB limit. I'm hoping to survive until the end of June, when my free trial of Microsoft 365 ends and the paid membership begins and expands my storage.

So, anyhow, you should be able to hook Thunderbird onto your email server, and Thunderbird should then download messages onto your computer. There should be a setting that allows you to delete messages from the server as you download them. Be sure to come back and tell us how you like Thunderbird. I have used various iterations of Microsoft Outlook for over 30 years, so I think I'll stick with it. I can afford the ten bucks a month. The devil you know....

-Joe-

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: Newport Boy
Date: 10 Jun 20 - 06:46 AM

Joe - I don't use hushed and reverent tones regarding Thunderbird. It's just a very competent and full-featured email client. I don't do emails on the move, so that use of webmail isn't relevant. One thing that webmail won't let me do is move threads and emails from one mail account to another - you can't easily view two email accounts at once.

I monitor 6 email accounts - 2 groups of 3. Many people know me in more than one of these roles and some of them can't conceive of a person using more than one email address. So when they use the wrong address, I just move the email to the correct inbox and reply.

You can set Thunderbird to download emails (POP) or leave them on the server (IMAP). If you're using POP, you can choose the period after downloading to leave the email on the server. There are many other settings.

I find the most useful feature to be filters. I have one which moves any email containing 'casino' or 'online gaming' to the Junk folder, so it never reaches the Inbox.

I've used Thunderbird since 2005. I've tried a few other clients but none of them seemed any better to me.

Phil

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: DaveRo
Date: 10 Jun 20 - 07:51 AM

Unless you have a very good reason, and understand the limitations, don't use POP. It's essentially an obsolete technology. Some email providers require secure signon that they do not support on POP. (Some are trying for years to abandon IMAP in favour of proprietary protocols.) With IMAP you can read and reply to email on any number of devices and it's all kept in sync. Even if you only use one device now it's likely you'll use more in future, and POP is a PITA on several devices. I was a hold-out on POP for ages, but even I converted several years ago.

As for conversion from Live Mail, I have no experience of it, but CSV sounds easy enough. Try it. You can easily load the CSV file into a spreadsheet and delete superfluous columns. I suppose you don't have to convert contacts at all if you have them in some online mail system, such as Google's. You could just connect to it with something like this:
TbSync

I have my mobile contacts sync'd with a similar service, but I've never got round to connecting Thunderbird to it.

Email clients are a bit of an anachronism. Thunderbird is one of the few left. If it didn't exist, I don't think it would be invented. But it does exist and is kept updated by a very small team and many volunteers.

Now a plug:
In a few months Thunderbird will update from 68 to 78. When it does, you might find these addons useful.
Limit non-BCC recipients
Expand mailing lists

My wife maintains several U3A mailing lists and sends emails to large groups. Those are to prevent accidentally sharing everybody's email addesses, or deleting individuals from a group mailing.

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: Newport Boy
Date: 10 Jun 20 - 09:43 AM

Dave - I'm a bit of an anachronism too! As I said, I don't do emails on the move. I don't use email or browsing on my phone and the only time I use email on my laptop is our 2-week holiday in Scotland. For that, I take my backup disk and use the same profile. I'm unlikely to change in the future - at 84 changes have to be forced on me!

Webmail doesn't interest me. With multiple accounts on different domains, it's slow and cumbersome. Online apps have a habit of changing or disappearing. The oldest email in my Thunderbird archive is Oct 2003, migrated from Eudora.

Thanks for the plug:-) I will probably use those addons when the update comes. Our U3A uses the Beacon membership system, so bulk emails to our 1800+ members are no problem.

Phil

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: DaveRo
Date: 10 Jun 20 - 11:34 AM

I was thinking of writing a Firefox addon for Beacon today to make it a bit more friendly - and BIGGER! If I ever do, I'll let you know.

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 10 Jun 20 - 12:08 PM

I've used Mozilla's Thunderbird for many years, after I gave up trying to get good updates for Pegasus Mail (one we used at work before the university switched us all over to Outlook).

I have a half-dozen Gmail accounts that all feed into Thunderbird and Gmail doesn't like Thunderbird so occasionally tries to get me to click a setting in an email to "secure my account." Don't fall for that one or your T-Bird access to that account will be locked out until you figure out how to fix it.

I use POP in the computer because I want a copy of the email downloaded. I go through the Gmail site every so often and dump old stuff, but having a resident copy is useful. On my laptop and phone and tablet they're set to IMAP because I just check mail there occasionally, I don't need to fill up those drives with downloads.

I agree with Newport Boy - I think Thunderbird will figure it out easier than you can by thinking too hard about it. :)

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: Mr Red
Date: 11 Jun 20 - 02:47 AM

The GF has to use IMAP because she doesn't delve into it in any depth and has 3 TABs and three PCs. It needs some common protocol in all devices. I would guess IMAP and contacts are all it needs.

I tried exporting from her LiveMail app and nowhere did it offer anything looking like .csv. Despite many websites saying it should. Maybe archiving .pst is the best insurance. I didn't set up her computers. Maybe when her friend set them up he didn't anticipate MS fickleness, and why would he?

& BTW one forum did advocate editng the .csv from live mail because quote TB can't handle 56 columns unquote. I took that to mean what it said. Selecting fields would be fine if TB can count that high!

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: DaveRo
Date: 11 Jun 20 - 03:09 AM

My (very) brief G-search suggests that a pst file contains email not contacts. If you use IMAP you don't need to migrate emails, TB will simply re-sync them from the server. Start with TB empty, set up the accounts, and wait...

Your OP said you want to convert 'contacts etc'. What's 'etc'?

I suspect you're looking in the wrong place for exporting contacts. And how can a contact have >56 data items? Maybe theoretically...

If it does, load the csv into a spreadsheet, highlight all the empty columns or ones that hold this junk, and delete them. At the same time delete any email addresses you don't recognise; many email systems 'collect' addresses of emails you've been copied on. (TB does, but it keeps them separately as 'collected addresses'.

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: DaveRo
Date: 11 Jun 20 - 06:19 AM

I said earlier than email programs like Thunderbird were a bit of an anachronism. It's why most of them - Eudora, Pegasus (I used that too) have disappeared. The Mozilla organisation doesn't maintain Thunderbird any more, though it keeps the name and is still based on Firefox core technology. Mozilla did not think it was worth putting scarce resources into a non-mobile-capable email program - and I think they were right. Having said that, it's a very powerful email program, and I use it a lot.

The idea of an address book being part of an email program is also an anachronism. Most devices keep data about 'contacts' separate from the email and messaging apps. When I first got an Android tablet I decided to use the K9 open-source email app and was surprised that it didn't contain an address book; you have to use Google Contacts, or an equivalent online service.

So if I were setting up a new Thunderbird instance now, and I already had my contacts somewhere online (I think windows live mail contacts are held at contacts.live.com) I wouldn't convert them. If at all possible, I'd just connect to them using Tbsync and one of the 'provider' addons like Provider for CalDAV & CardDAV

I don't know if any of those addons will work with microsoft's servers, but it's worth investigating. If it doesn't work, I would work out where is the best place to hold contacts that Thunderbird and any other email programs can all sync with them. (My recommendation would be a NextCloud service.)

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: Howard Kaplan
Date: 11 Jun 20 - 11:34 PM

About 18 months ago, I moved from Eudora to Thunderbird. To accomplish the move effectively, I needed to use Aid4Mail. I started by downloading a limited trial that would move just a few messages, and it worked, so I paid for a subscription and migrated my entire email history plus my contacts. According to the web site, it can move archives from LiveMail to Thunderbird, so I think it would be worth your investigating.

I'm generally happy using Thunderbird. The main problem I've had is controlling the format of email I'm composing. I'm often unsure whether what I'm seeing looks correct on my screen because Thunderbird has inserted formatting to force it to appear that way or because Thunderbird has inserted no formatting and it's just using my display defaults. Sometimes what I've written comes back to me quoted without modification, and the quoted version looks horrible, so I need to assume it looked equally bad when my correspondent received it.

I've also had some problems where the display refuses to switch to a new message when I click on it in my inbox, so I need to make a more radical switch (such as opening a different folder and coming back to the inbox) to restore responsiveness.

It's definitely an improvement over the last version of Eudora, but it's not as good as I'd like.

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: DaveRo
Date: 12 Jun 20 - 03:15 AM

You can never be sure that an (html) email looks the same to the recipient as to you its composer. It will depend on what email app (I include desktop programs and webmail) is used to display it. Many email apps filter the content to exclude images and links that could be used to track whether you open or read the email. (Thunderbird does.) The fonts available to the composer and the recipient will differ unless they use exacly the same operating system, and that will affect text size. Some mobile email apps do not have the ability to render some html features. Display sizes vary enormously...

Most email apps will render the basics OK - heading levels, bold, italic, colours, relative (but not absolute) text size. If you stick to those it should be comprehensible to your readers even if it looks different. An email is, after all, a message not a publishing system. If you want it to look the same to everybody, send a pdf!

Thunderbird includes the Firefox browser's rendering (display) engine. What you see during composition should look similar, but not identical, to what a recipient sees if using a browser - i.e. webmail. But the 'window' size will probably differ which will change line lengths and may displace images.

Most html emails are sent in 'multipart/alternative' format. It contains both your lovingly-crafted html version, and the same in plain text - which will lack bold, italic, colours, etc. Some (rather few) email apps cannot display html so they show the plain text. Rather more recipients prefer to read emails in plain text - it can be quicker to get the gist of them. I do on small devices. So they never see the message as you composed it, and naybe you never checked what they are actually seeing ;)

If the person replying to your email chooses to reply in plain text they may dump the html part entirely and what you'll see is the plain text version of your email with quote indents '>'. Is that what you mean by "the quoted version looks horrible"?

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: Newport Boy
Date: 12 Jun 20 - 05:38 AM

Interesting summary, Dave. I don't use many html features - bold, italic & sometimes colour - but the text size thing is a real annoyance. I've learnt to spot the replies with very small text and drop my text down a size to avoid them seeing it as large print.

However, I haven't mastered the problem of some emails changing my paragraph settings. I have a blank line between paragraphs - Return gives that. Replying to some emails, I find that Return doesn't give the blank line. If I then insert it, sometimes the recipient sees one blank line, sometimes two. I can't figure that one out.

Phil

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: DaveRo
Date: 12 Jun 20 - 07:37 AM

I don't generally write emails in html so I don't notice this, but it's a question that's been asked many times on the Thunderbird support forums.

A few years back Thunderbird made a change that seems to have confused and upset a lot of people. It changed the default style in the compose window (the style that the first word you type is in, if you don't change it) to 'Paragraph'. So in the email it's sent with a 'p' tag. This seems entirely logical to me - you're starting a paragraph, unless you specify it's a heading or something.

Apparently before that change, the compose window assigned 'body text' - I assume that's what it said in the pull-down list at top-left. But there is no html tag or style called 'body text'. What it did was not put any tags round the text. It just put (line break) tags at the end of each line. People had got used to that.

More confusing, for my anyway, is that they left 'Body text' as an apparent style in the pull down list. But if you select it it generates 'p' tags anyway. And it reverts to Paragraph when you hit newline. This seems inconsistent to me; I don't know whether anybody has tried justifying it.

How this appears to the recipient depends on what his app/client/webmail displays for paragraphs, and for text without tags. You won't know for sure, but it's fairly standard. Paragraphs are usually displayed with a gap between them, which is good for actual paragraphs but not so good for single lines. (So don't put an extra linespace between paragraphs: it's not a typewriter!) Untagged text is just displayed in some default font and spacing - but usually single-spaced.

It's possible to revert to the old behaviour in options/preferences > config-editor > set mail.compose.default_to_paragraph to false

What I do, if I have to compose in html, is use the Preformat style and then set the font-family, size, etc to whatever I want.

The other thing to know is that, unless the email includes italics, colour, a specific font, or something that can't be presented in a plain text email it won't sent it in html anyway - it'll send in plain-text. So that can affect how the viewer sees it. An email with two black lines of text may look different, in terms of spacing and typeface, to two blue lines.

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: Richard Mellish
Date: 12 Jun 20 - 09:24 AM

Apropos plain text and HTML; I occasionally receive an email that someone has sent out to their mailing list where the HTML is current but the plain text is a copy of whatever they sent last time. I assume they must be composing the email by starting by a "resend" of the last one and then updating it, with a mail client that defaults to showing HTML only so they never see the old text.

Apropos POP versus IMAP: there's a good reason why both have remained in use side by side for so long: they have their respective pros and cons. I use POP because I prefer to have all my emails locally under my control, where I can file them, archive them, delete them, back them up, or whatever. It is a minor inconvenience to have to copy the set of folders containing them (in effect a sort of database) from the desktop computer to the notebook when I go off on a trip (which of course isn't happening at present anyway).

And I remain to be convinced of the virtue of a database of contacts with their email addresses, postal addresses, mobile and landline phone numbers and heaven knows what else all under the control of Google or Microsoft. It seems to me that the best place for phone numbers is a phone and the best place for email addresses is a mail client.

But back to the OP's (or rather the OP's GF's) problem: with IMAP everything including the contacts should be safe on the email provider's server anyway. I have recently been helping a friend cope with a new email client after up(?)grading from Windows 7 to 10. I did save her contacts, but the new client found them on the IMAP server without any special action being needed.

As a precaution, you could export in whatever format(s) the old email client can manage, then look at those files and find some way to fangle them into CSV.

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 12 Jun 20 - 12:08 PM

I go into my Gmail accounts (in the browser) and filter to bring up the various senders and delete the ones I don't need. They will keep just about everything forever, but I prefer not to have that stuff around. If I have email from something critical I go in and delete the online version because it's just out there in the Gmail world otherwise. I also have a secure account through my university (but it will rebel if any important numbers are included such as credit card or social security numbers). I try to never send that kind of stuff through email anyway. Faxes are for that.

And yes, it is still possible to send a fax, even without having a landline or a fax machine. I use https://www.gotfreefax.com/. You can send a couple of short ones free per day, or buy an account.

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: DaveRo
Date: 12 Jun 20 - 01:08 PM

Richard Mellish wrote: I remain to be convinced of the virtue of a database of contacts with their email addresses, postal addresses, mobile and landline phone numbers and heaven knows what else all under the control of Google or Microsoft.

Me neither. So I have those under my own control on a NextCloud server, which is hosted for free for small amounts of data and is in the EU. (It's like Dropbox, but DIY and non-commercal.)

But Google will collect your contacts, if you use Gmail or Android. I don't know about Microsoft and Apple.

Thunderbird can share Nextcloud and GMail contacts via the addons I mentioned. But I know nothing about Microsoft's email services.

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: Mr Red
Date: 14 Jun 20 - 04:26 AM

And how can a contact have >56 data items?

Well anything is possible with Micro$oft. And stackexchange.com posts (or similar) gave as the answer to failures in importing that of the finding of 56 and, yes edit in a spreadsheet.

The other factor is that I won't be doing the transfer. But, yes, with IMAP contacts & settings it should be sufficient to complete the transfer. But a swift survey revealed a folder structure for e-mails that in theory would be neat and tidy, but sub-folders parked in totally unconnected folders. Difficult to find, and no apparent logic. Remember, she is a naive user - and this is merely a tool, not a hobby.

I have a blank line between paragraphs - if you suspect your blank line will be discarded at the RX end, try putting a full stop/period on the blank line, or some obvious printing character like "*". Worth a try.

Subject: RE: Tech: livemail export 2 Thunderbird ???
From: Mr Red
Date: 14 Jun 20 - 04:38 AM

Another thought on storing contact data and e-mails in the cloud is if you are hacked. And naive users may not have strong passwords. It is why I largely stick with POP. I can review my messages, and prepare replies off-line when the broadband is unreliable.

It is worthy noting that the GF's primary e-mail address is tied to the provider, and despite protestations that it is a disincentive to change providers, the words fell on deaf ears to at least two close people. One did change provider and saw the problem develop, but still ignored the solution. Hey Ho.