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Showing posts from March, 2015

"Why Do I Lose Email Messages When I Import Mailboxes from Thunderbird or Postbox to Apple Mail?"

Apple Mail uses a more restrictive standard than Thunderbird or Postbox do when looking for the start of a new message, so it simply misses many or most of them. On one attempted mailbox import, I saw the message count drop about 95%! The scary part is, if I hadn't checked the count in Postbox against the count in Mail, I might not even have realized I'd lost anything. Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, a commonly recommended solution for importing from Thunderbird to Mail, did exactly the same thing, for the exact same message count. (I ran it on Snow Leopard Server in a virtual machine.) So, how do you import without loss? I'm going to make this very simple for you. Use Weird Kid Software's Emailchemy , a brilliant app for converting from one email format to another. In the Preferences, on the "Standard mbox" tab, select "Relaxed" for "Compliance to mbox standard when reading." I also suggest you choose "UNIX and Mac OS X: LF" for &quo

"Why Is BBEdit Corrupting My Thunderbird or Postbox Mailboxes?"

Instructions for repairing your mailboxes commonly tell you to edit the files in a text editor, and BBEdit is usually recommended for the Mac. Unfortunately, for Thunderbird or Postbox mailboxes, this is about the worst advice you can get. More often than not, merely editing and saving the file in BBEdit will seriously corrupt the mailbox. Why is that? The problem lies in how both the text editor and the email apps work, and in how those ways interact. Thunderbird and Postbox store received email messages with Unix line endings -- "LF" or "line feed" -- as they should. But when you compose a message, those apps create and store it with Windows line endings -- "CRLF" or "carriage return, line feed." So, unless you keep your sent and received messages in separate mailboxes, you get mixed line endings in the same file. (Postbox was built on Thunderbird code, so the similarities should be no surprise.) As the folks at BBEdit explained it to me, s

"How Do I Cancel/Close/Delete My WordPress.com or Gravatar Account?"

Update, Feb. 10, 2019—As Anonymous points out in the comments below, you can now delete your Wordpress account here: www.wordpress.com/me/account/close It works! But in case you're still interested, here's my original post: ________________________________________ Well, you can't, but you can nuke them so they're as good as closed. In the spirit of overkill, here's how to do it with Gravatar, which is actually a feature of WordPress. 1. Go to Gravatar and sign in. 2. Delete your image. 3. Find your Gravatar profile, and click "Hide" at the bottom right. 4. Go to WordPress.com and sign in. 5. Click on the personal settings icon at upper right. (It looks like a head and shoulders in a circle.) 6. Go to the Security tab. 7. Under "Connected Applications," remove Gravatar. For your WordPress.com account: 1. Sign in to WordPress.com. 2. Click on "My Site" at upper left and then on "WP Admin" to find t