[sylpheed:31862] Re: Moving mail to new machine

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 22 Oct 2007 00:10:21 +0200
Gil Andre <andre.g at wanadoo.fr> dijo:

> I also have tons of folders in my email box, and they all appear
> (as folders) under "inbox".
> 
> Seems to me something went seriously wrong when you tried to
> restore your email. Especially since all these files are 0
> bytes in length... Or am I wrong?
> 
> I would suggest you try restoring again your email from the
> last known backup...

There is more to this story that I left out. The reason for the new
installation was that I had massive disk corruption on /dev/hda2. I
used e2fsck and it cleaned everything up (including saving all my mail
files), but a few files were not salvaged - including some required for
Ubuntu Feisty to boot. I tried for several days, but eventually
installed Gutsy on an unused 20 GB space. That is where I was trying to
get Sylpheed installed and using my folders. I dragged all the folders
from the old partition to the new one, but it did not go well, as can
be seen from the messages in this thread.

The corruption was caused by a flaky connector, due to bad design. I
have struggled with this for the past two and a half years. I finally
decided that it was time to get rid of the computer and buy a new one.
I am typing this on a brand new Lenovo Thinkpad T61 on which I
installed Gutsy amd64 as a new, fresh install. Using a crossover cable
I moved all files from ~/ to the new computer - and I mean everything,
hidden files, configuration files - everything. I set myself up with
the same username as well.

Then I installed Sylpheed from Synaptic. When I launched it, all my
folders and e-mails popped up, all were visible, I had no problem
getting mail, and I doubt there will be any problem sending.

I don't know what went wrong with the other installation, but it
doesn't matter. I just consider it a good learning exercise for how to
move my mail from one computer to another. The old computer is going to
be donated to a Linux-based non-profit. Thanks to all for the
suggestions and advice. Perhaps someone else will profit from the
trials I went through.

Meantime, I am loving my new computer and 64-bit Gutsy. Absolutely
everything worked out of the box.