Switching to Mac OS X: The Ugly

Out of the frying pan into the fire. Here I was all excited that now my mail was in a format (mbox) that most mailers readily recognised. I used the mail2pine perl script tip but that wasn't successful. I initially thought that there was a mistake in the script (as it is a few years old) and hacked around it but still no success. Using Unix shell commands, I linked some of the pine mailbox names to the ones imported into Mail. When I tried to view them through pine, the penny dropped. I could not see a list of messages but a list of individual text files each containing a single message. Some research on the Internet revealed that Mail no longer uses the standard mbox format. Though the mailboxes are mbox files, they are in fact folders where each message is stored individually as a .emlx file. Pine does not expect this. Mail has good reason for doing so as this allows for indexing of individual messages (and hence searching).

Imagine my frustration. I decided to move away from Outlook to escape a proprietary format and fell into another one.

You may ask why I just do not use pine off an IMAP server. I still like to use POP3 and download all my email so that I have an offline archive that does not need to be synchronised with a server again and again. Also most IMAP servers have fairly strong space restrictions (I cannot upload several gigabytes of data ... I am not the only one ... there are other equally crazy email stashing people in the world :) ).

I also did not manage to import my contacts, calendar, etc. The CSV or tab-separated files that I could export from Outlook were not even properly readable by Entourage. AddressBook kept on hanging while trying to read them. So I ended up manually updating my calendar entries and just archiving my contacts in an Excel file for later adding to AddressBook as needed.

But do I regret making a switch to Mac OS X. Not so far. I am frustrated by the "ugly" (IMO :) ) set up of mailboxes in Mail. But I love the flexibility of Unix. Things are so much easier to manage compared to Windows. So far the mail import is the hardest thing I have had to do. I do plan to run the two machines in parallel for a while to ensure that any proprietary data formats on Windows can be transferred. I suspect I will end up having a dual boot to surmount the problem of using MS Project. So far the switch seems to have been worthwhile but it is only a few days in and I suppose I am having far too much fun being back to Unix to notice the quirks. But that was the main reason I decided to switch to Mac OS X. So it works so far. More later.