Mail

Once I got the network to the PC going, I went into Mozilla on the PC and imported my e-mail from Outlook Express. I then copied the imported mail folder from the Mozilla profile over to the iBook. I had installed Mozilla for the Mac earlier, and I placed the Mozilla mail files in the Mac Mozilla profile folder, and Mac Mozilla saw the mail just fine. I then went into Mac OS X Mail and ran the importer to grab the mail. The problem was that the Netscape/Mozilla importer didn't want to work, so I used "other", which imports mail folder that are of the Unix "mbox" form. When pointed to the right folder, this worked fine. The only problem was that all my mail was now marked as unread, but that didn't take long to fix.

The mail program is nice so far. One thing that was different than what I was able to read about it beforehand was the inbox structure. What I read seemed to indicate that if you had several e-mail accounts being retrieved into Mail, they would each go into subfolders in the inbox, but in reality, they all go into the one inbox (which is how I was used to with Outlook Express). The subfolders of the inbox for each account are there, and you can click one to see just the mail from that account, but otherwise, the inbox is a composite of all the messages from all the accounts.

The message rules are nice. I can simply have messages from certain people or mail lists colored to easily spot them. The rule creation is slick too, because if you highlight a message and then create a rule, any criteria you set up are automatically filled in with the values from the message you had highlighted as default values. A small nit is to apply the rule to existing messages, you need to select all in the inbox, then go apply the rule.

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