[kennedy]

Anyone switching from Lotus Notes to Apple Mail? If so, you'll really enjoy the huge step up in quality... from one of the worst email clients on the planet to one of the best. Unfortunately, there's no good way to get your mail out of Lotus Notes into anything else. Your best hope is if you can get an IMAP account setup that you can upload your mail into... I didn't have that option. Forwarding each email might work for the first 30 or so... after that, it'll get real old. Soooooo...

I used a bit of Unix scripting to convert the text file that you can export from Lotus Notes into a proper mbox... which can then be imported by Apple Mail. Note, however, that Lotus Notes doesn't export the attachments... so, you'll still need to forward any messages with attachments... but if that's just 5% of your email, this may save you a huge amount of forwarding.

I can't attach the files in this forum, so they will be in the following three posts. The first is the bash script. The second and third are helper files that the script uses.

Set up the directory like this:

cd Desktop
mkdir lotus2mail
cd lotus2mail
mkdir imports
mkdir exports

Then plop the three following posts into files 'lotusw2mail', 'lotus2mail.sed', and 'lotus2mail.pre', respectively. The resultant directory should look like this:

[MacHD:~/Desktop/lotus2mail] me% ls -l
total 32
drwxr-xr-x 5 me staff 170 Sep 11 01:28 exports
drwxr-xr-x 5 me staff 170 Sep 11 01:28 imports
-rw-r--r-- 1 me staff 46 Sep 11 00:19 lotus2mail.pre
-rw-r--r-- 1 me staff 55 Sep 10 23:55 lotus2mail.sed
-rwxr-xr-x 1 me staff 1176 Sep 11 01:27 lotusw2mail

Export from Lotus Notes into the 'exports' directory. (Follow the directions in this other SWITCHER TIPS thread for how to mount your Mac user directory on your Windows machine; or just export and then FTP across.)

Then cd to exports and run lotusw2mail (see the instructions in that file, the next post), then have Apple Mail import from the imports directory. I have been doing this on an ongoing basis, in fact.

Hope that is of use to some.

[kennedy]

#!\bin\bash
#
# FILENAME: lotusw2mail (Lotus for Windows ==> Apple Mail)
# PURPOSE: Convert Lotus Notes' export file to a proper mbox
# (Mac = CR; Unix = LF; Windows = CR LF)
# INSTRUCTIONS: Make sure you back up your files before you do this!!!
# In Lotus Notes, select the folder you wish to export.
# File... Export... as structured text, default format.
# Be sure to use Form Feed as message separator.
# Export into the 'exports' subdirectory of this directory.
# In Terminal, do:
# cd [this directory]/exports
# bash ../lotusw2mail *.txt
# In Apple Mail, File... Import...
# select the 'imports' subdirectory of this one.
# Delete the files just imported.
# rm *.txt *.tmp ../imports/*
# LIMITATIONS: Lotus Notes does not export attachments; must forward those.
# AUTHOR: Brian Kennedy
# HISTORY: 2003/09/10 Created
#

mkdir -p ../imports
for file in "$@"
do
wc "$file"
dir=`dirname "$file"`
target=`basename "$file" .txt`
tr -d '\r' < "$file" | sed -f ../lotus2mail.sed > "$dir/$target.tmp"
cat ../lotus2mail.pre "$dir/$target.tmp" | formail -s > "../imports/$target"
rm "$dir/$target.tmp"
wc "../imports/$target"
done

[kennedy]

s/
/\
\
From Lotus_Notes@mycom.com Tue Sep 2 10:00:00 PM/g

[kennedy]

From Lotus_Notes@mycom.com Tue Sep 2 10:00:00 PM