Re: OSX Mail app → Emacs ?

[Joost Kremers]

On Sat, Jun 03 2017, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> If I wanted to transition my mailing activity from OSX's Mail 
> app to Emacs, what would be the best path to do that ?
>
> I see plenty of tutorials on how to *start* using mail in Emacs, 
> but not on how to move one's thousands of mails to a structure 
> that Emacs can access...
>
> Any hints ?

That probably depends on what mailer you want to use. Personally, 
I never got the hang of Gnus, but I'm very happy with mu4e. Mu4e 
only reads maildir format, so you'd have to convert your mbox 
files to maildir. A quick Google search reveals there's a script 
mb2md.pl that can take care of that. (I also needed to convert 
from mbox to maildir when I started using mu4e, but I was using 
Mutt at the time, which handles maildir as well as mbox, so I used 
that for the conversion.)

Since mu/mu4e doesn't talk to any remote servers, you'll need to 
set up something to retrieve your email. In the case of IMAP, that 
would be OfflineIMAP or mbsync. If POP is all you need, you'd be 
looking at fetchmail and perhaps procmail (but don't take my word 
for it, since I haven't used POP in well over a decade.)

If you want to use notmuch, the procedure is pretty much the same. 
Gnus, IIUC, can handle more mailbox formats, so you may get away 
without converting anything. There are other mailers for Emacs 
(Mew and Wanderlust come to mind), but I know even less about 
those than Gnus.

HTH

--
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments