How to import Eudora Mail to Apple Mail including non-ASCII characters?

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Level 2

159 points

How to import Eudora Mail to Apple Mail including non-ASCII characters?

What is the best way to move messages from Eudora to the latest version of Apple Mail on the latest Mac OS X version, including the ones with non-ASCII characters (accented, etc)?

The Apple Mail import feature and applications like Eudora Mailbox Cleaner or Emailchemy do not import properly non-ASCII characters.

Mac mini, OS X El Capitan (10.11.3), Booting from internal Fusion Drive.

Posted on Apr 16, 2016 11:03 AM

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Answer 1

theratter

Level 4

3,961 points

Apr 16, 2016 11:27 AM in response to ApMaX

If memory serves you can import Eudora mail into Thunderbird from which you can export to Mail. You might search Google for some other solutions if new ones have appeared in the last couple of decades.

For $30 you can get MailChemy that may help solve the problem or porting Eudora.

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Answer 2

ApMaX Author

Level 2

159 points

Apr 16, 2016 2:34 PM in response to theratter

Thanks, but unfortunately the procedure with Thunderbird does not work with non-ASCII characters. On the other hand, MailChemy does not exist. It is Emailchemy, and does not work either as said above.

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Answer 3

theratter

Level 4

3,961 points

Apr 16, 2016 3:24 PM in response to ApMaX

Then try using Thunderbird which is now the Eudora replacement for the Mac. Otherwise, you will need to edit out these non-ASCII characters. You will not likely find any transfer program that will retain characters that are unaccepted in just about every current email program except Eudora. But I would use Google to search for things such as the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner or Eudora. The latter supposedly works with 10.9.2.

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Answer 4

ApMaX Author

Level 2

159 points

Apr 16, 2016 3:48 PM in response to theratter

Thanks, but there is no Eudora replacement. Thunderbird does not have Eudora features or interface at all. They are completely different applications. On the other hand, I cannot edit messages, since they are several million. Finally, Eudora does not work beyond Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard.

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Answer 5

cdhw

Level 4

3,594 points

Apr 16, 2016 3:51 PM in response to ApMaX

I suspect that the problem is that Eudora used iso-8859-1 encoding and Mail uses utf8 but I don't have a way of confirming this guess. If it's right, you can try converting one of the Eudora mailbox files using iconv:

iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 < eudoraFile > eudoraFileFixed

and see if it imports correctly. If so, this command can be wrapped in a script to convert lots of files.

C.

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Answer 6

ApMaX Author

Level 2

159 points

Apr 17, 2016 1:14 AM in response to cdhw

The problem is that there are many messages as said. Some messages with non-ASCII are imported OK, but others not. What I am looking for is a tool (commercial or whatever) that can handle all possibilities to import millions of messages without unexpected surprises of wrong import for non-ASCII like accented characters later on. Since Eudora handles them OK, such tool to import them properly into Apple Mail should be possible.

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Answer 7

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,240 points

Apr 17, 2016 8:12 AM in response to ApMaX

ApMaX wrote:

Since Eudora handles them OK, such tool to import them properly into Apple Mail should be possible.

If I remember right, part of the problem is that Eudora really did not handle all non-ascii characters ok, only those contained in one small range, Latin 1. For everything else, including the standard utf-8, it used various non-standard plugins, tables, and other cludges. It would not surprise me to find out that there was no simple way to translate everything correctly.

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