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I've been struggling with the speed and lack of features present in the Mail.app program included in the Panther and Tiger versions of Mac OS X. I've also been experimenting with PGP a lot lately, and Apple's lack of direct support for PGP plugins has led me to migrate my mail messages to the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client

Thunderbird is a cleanly-designed e-mail client available for all popular computing platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) and is part of the Mozilla family of Open Source products. I was expecting some difficulty in migrating my e-mail data since I was ultimately unable to get my messages out of Microsoft Outlook when moving to the Mac over 2 years ago. This wasn't the case with Thunderbird. Information on the Thunderbird website led me to believe that I could simply copy my "mbox" directories into the Thunderbird library directory and be done with it. Unfortunately, this applies only to the first version of Mail.app, which is not included on Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) (version 2 is included, instead). A quick Google search led me to a blog entry that then directed me to the Apple support site which recommended a program for converting Mail.app's "emlx" files into Thunderbird-friendly "mbox" files.

In 15 minutes, I was working in Thunderbird with all of my old mail messages looking pristine as ever. Now the Thunderbird just needs to tie in to the Mac OS X Addressbook. Then I would be in heaven!