Supernova mbox to maildir auto-conversion

Long time TB user, monthly supporter. Have for years used a modified version of John Carlson’s “mb2md” php script to convert user’s data from mbox to maildir.

However, not everyone is comfortable running command line scripts, and there’s still a bit of manual work (editing filter paths, etc.) that needs to be done following a conversion.

As long as TB has been around, certainly some users are still on mbox.

Hopefully this process will be automated with upcoming v115.

If this is not already planned, am suggesting it be added in as a feature for the new version…

Thunderbird 115 / Supernova is feature complete, and so will not have what you are suggesting.

Might you have some instructions you could provide so I and others could convert to Maildir?

Just a word before anyone tries the script mentioned above: either that mb2md.php script no longer works, or it’s so poorly documented that it’s not possible to get it to work from the given instructions. I just lost over two hours trying to get all the various dependencies set up before I finally hit a brick wall. I’ve installed the Pear Mail package (which the instructions do not tell you you need to install) as well as the Mail_Mbox-0.6.3 package and nothing works. Even if you can figure out the extraordinarily complicated way** to get it to stop giving you the PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Failed opening required 'Mail/Mbox.php' (include_path='.:') in /path/to/mb2md.php:51, first of all, then there are actually spelling mistakes in the script, such as str_repace on line 95, and if you fix that, there are still more fatal errors and two and a half hours of debugging a broken script is enough time wasted for me. Whoever wrote this has never once run it; because, it does not run at all. He would have caught the spelling mistakes, at least, if he had run it even once before posting it.

If, as OP says, there once was a working version of this script, then it has changed since then. The current version does not, and can not, work, without very extensive changes that are not documented. If anybody wants to play with it, go ahead, it’s at http://www.831web.com/solution-center/mbox-to-maildir-converter-tool, but don’t expect it to work at all.

I did see a very complicated procedure online that involved creating new accounts, moving profile folders around, and moving folders between dummy accounts and Local Folders to convert them. Par for the course, a very simple need and Thunderbird only gives you extremely complex, technical, and at least partially broken, ways to do it.

(**ok, wth, here’s the instructions to do that. First you must add this before the line 51 include step:

$paths = explode(PATH_SEPARATOR,get_include_path());
$paths[] = '/special/path/to/pear';
$path_combined = implode(PATH_SEPARATOR,$paths);

To get /special/path/to/pear, you must first run /path/to/pear config-show | grep php_dir. That will give you the path that goes there, which is different from /path/to/pear.

That got the Failed opening required 'Mail/Mbox.php' error fixed for me. That’s when I discovered the spelling error in the script. I fixed the spelling error, then got yet another fatal error, and that’s when I gave up.)