After calling tech support, I found that the fastest way to resolve the issue was to locate an e-mail the company had sent me back in 2006 with specific information that would allow them to verify that I was indeed the owner of the account.

That’s when a larger problem reared it’s ugly, ugly head — e-mail archives.

I tend to hang onto things, especially when they are digital because they take no physical space. This is especially true of e-mail. I save every e-mail sent to me and I’ve been doing that from day one. As simple as that may sound, it’s been a long and winding road through a variety of e-mail clients I’ve used over the past 15 years.

As you might imagine, over the past decade and a half and I’ve not always been successful in brining my e-mail archives along with me. I have several “islands” of digital data stored in one program’s format or another. These drives have been pulled from old computers and are sitting in desk drawers, or on shelves somewhere. I could resurface Route 66 with my good intentions of going back to import my e-mail from the old program I was using into the new shiny program that I just had to try.

Right now I’m migrating back to Apple Mail from Postbox and this time I’ve vowed to do things right. I’m taking the extra time to bring my archives with me and it’s a tedious process.

How I Import My Thunderbird (Mac) E-mail Into Apple Mail (mail.app)

1. Run the Remove Duplicate Messages Thunderbird Add-on to shrink down the archive and remove duplicate messages, if any.
2. Break up my yearly archives into quarterly archives so that the file sizes aren’t so huge by moving all e-mails within a specified date range (Jan 1 – Mar 31 for example) into their quarterly folder
3. Right-click each folder I’ve touched and choose “Compact”
4. Find the location of my profile (~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/Mail/Local Folders/) and drag the archive I’m importing to the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner icon on the dock, which imports the archive into mail.app. I do this one archive at a time.
5. Launch Apple Mail, find the imported folder and choose “Mailbox \ Rebuild” from the top menu
6. Move the imported e-mail to the proper archive folder “On My Mac”.
7. Rinse and repeat as needed

Bear in mind, this process is something that has evolved over time. My first several efforts yielded very poor results, but as I tried one method after another, I whittled away at the issues plaguing me until I arrived at a proper solution that works well for me. As I write this, I’m currently working through my 2007 archives, with 2006 being my last archive.

The real question is how I’ll bridge to my other digital islands and import old e-mails from The Bat! and Eudora. Those are of course in Windows and I’m sure will each yield their own special kind of hell as I tear up the road that led me back to these near-forgotten artifacts.

So What Do You Do?

As the last of my 2007 archive is being rebuilt in Apple Mail, I can’t help but wonder what other people do. Am I alone in not wanting to discard past conversations and hang on to these little tidbits? Assuming I’m not alone, how do you handle your archives? Do you use MailSteward, or similar tools?

The plan was to leave the night of Thursday the 15th to get a head start on all the driving. High Point is an 8 hour drive, so instead of eating up all of Friday driving, we could break it up over two days and have most of Friday to browse the acres of furniture that High Point is known for. I also had to do my radio show for Computer Outlook that evening, and the day itself was crazy as ever with having to visit several client sites, shop for Holly, etc. Suffice to say that it I had a very busy day planned.

My second stop of the day was to my favorite caffinated watering hole Caffeine. They open at 7am and I was in the door shortly thereafter. My plan was to have some breakfast and get a little work done before my next appointment at 9am. I setup my laptop and sent my Tapwave Zodiac to go get my mail. Evelyn pulled a double espresso for me and Mark made my favorite breakfast dish of theirs – steak and eggs.

After a little chit chat to catch up on what they’ve been up to. I went to my table to enjoy a cup of coffee and go through my mail. I have a form on the weblog for people to contact me and my e-mail client flags them as urgent so that they don’t get lost in the deluge of my inbox. As I opened my mashby.com account, I saw that I had a “Contact Request”. As I went to open it, you can imagine my surprise when I looked at the address and saw that it was from John Mese. That’s right, I got an e-mail from John F**kin’ Mese!

It seems that John had found me while doing a Google search for when his episode of Law & Order was going to be re-aired and in the results was the article I did on my weblog. In his e-mail, John was very complimentary of the article that I wrote, although he said that he didn’t remember me, he did ask if I’d send him a picture. I sat there in Caffeine with my coffee in one hand, my Zodiac in the other and my mouth on the floor.

Now I’ve been meaning to reach out to John for some time now, but I didn’t have an address for him, or any method of contacting him directly. We do have a friend in common, so I had planned on calling her when I went to Baton Rouge the next month, but that was really my only option. What absolutely blew me away that HE reached out to ME.

I never even conceived that John would ever read the article that I wrote. I’m a small time writer publishing to a limited audience, so I had no grand visions that it would be read by anyone other than close friends. Case in point, I never would have written “He played some of the worst music I’ve ever heard in my life…”, if I thought that John would be reading the article. Thanks to Google though, he found it, read it, liked it and most surprising of all, took the time to contact me about it.

Sitting in Caffeine, I hit the reply button and responded. I sent him a link to a head shot that I had taken of myself a few years ago and also reminded him of a story from class in the hopes that it would trigger his memory. Much to my surprise, it did. In less than an hour, John replied again saying that he did indeed remember me, both by the photograph and the reminder of my final monologue I did in his class. Talk about flattered.

All throughout that weekend we e-mailed each other about what each of us have been up to and what we’re working. It was a great conversation and since then, we’ve continued to stay in touch. John has also offered some trivia about himself to add the to his profile, correcting a few entries I had made in error as well. Little did I know that by writing a little article about why I wanted to become John’s editor, would lead to actually being able to correspond with him one-on-one. When you connect the dots, it’s not so unfathomable, but at the same time it’s quite amazing.

I am continually amazed at how having a weblog can serve as a way to communicate with people. Sometimes it’s with people you haven’t talked to in ages and other times it can be complete strangers, but by putting a little something out there, your whole world can open up to new and exciting opportunities. Who knows, you might even get an e-mail from John F**kin’ Mese!