384615 - Migrate of Mozilla 1.x or Seamonkey mail is only available at first-run time

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Migration, enhancement)

Description

[k]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3
Build Identifier: latest al all

Unfortunately, the whole program is a bug. There is no way to import netscape 7 mail, and there is no way to manage or maintain or recover mail folders or directories. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.start app
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
Unfortunately, the whole program is a bug. There is no way to import netscape 7 mail, and there is no way to manage or maintain or recover mail folders or directories.

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

If this is the first run, a migration dialog should pop up. And of course you can manually move over all the mail folders to your new profile from the old.

See <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder>

Comment 2

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

Why is migration only available on the first run of the program?  

You can (later) import from Outlook, etc, but not Mozilla 1.x or Seamonkey (which by the way should be listed in addition to Mozilla 1.x).  You can't even import it when creating a new profile.

Someone with email in Seamonkey or Mozilla 1.x may well want to try Thunderbird before committing all their email to it; or they may run into a problem importing the email and need to do it again, or may want to import it into a new or secondary profile.  It's seriously non-intuitive to have to uninstall and re-install just to be presented with an import option.

Maybe this is WONTFIX, more likely this is "I don't care" or "maybe we'll get to it someday" (neither of which is a good answer), but this is a real problem.  Note: I'm going to limit this bug to the import issue.

Comment 3

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

Changed summary to limit scope of report.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

modding summary Import > Migrate

(In reply to comment #2)
> Why is migration only available on the first run of the program

I thought migrate was only offered on first run for all apps.  Is that not the case?

Comment 5

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

I'm not really aware of the differences between Import and Migrate, I had assumed they would do the same thing.  The report makes sense, I would think you should be able to Import information later that you didn't "Migrate" when first prompted.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

right, Migrate is the "prompted" offering by thunderbird to import data on first start.  import is manually initiated.  the end result, data wise, is/should be the same.  By convention, migration is offered only once.

Comment 7

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

By "first start", you mean "without using -migration", right?
Or do you actually mean something like "never again if any TB profile exists"?

Comment 8

[a_geek]

I actually have to agree with the submitter of this bug, esp. as importing email by moving mail folders around doesn't work for me. Tried to migrate from SM 1.1.18 to TB 3.0.3 that way, but so far, all old emails are inaccessible.

Will probably have to manually massage the mail into an IMAP server and redo the import from there, losing all message status information along the way (~1.6 gigs - yay!).

Re-running the import command was a NOP, pointing the message folder in the preferences dialogue to the old SM directory didn't work as well - I got only massivly garbled email display (eg. header of email1 plus body of email2).

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

given that import is an available substitute - if the old platform is still supported - then this is an ENH request IMO.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

This is past useful