Eudora email archive conversion

I’ve painfully moved all the files that used to be on my XP box to the iMac. I’m still using Eudora XP with the files now on the iMac server; performance is quite fine.

The email archives, however, aren’t indexed by Spotlight. Not to mention that Eudora died about two years ago. I can read the Eudora .mbx (mbox variant) files with TextWrangler, but that’s not terribly useful.

So I’m looking into conversion options. I’d prefer not to import the entire multi-GB archive into OS X Mail.app; I expect it would keel over and die.

I used my custom OS X search tool to look for “eudora conversion” and came up with:

• Eudora vCard Export: get the nicknames out
• Eudora Mailbox Cleaner: this is the most used approach and it’s free. Note the warnings “Mail 2.0 introduced a new mailbox format which uses a SQlite database (~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index) in addition to the mailboxes themselves. Until the imported messages are added to this database, the imported mailboxes will appear to be empty in Mail. Select "Mailbox → Rebuild" from the menu in Mail to rebuild each of the imported mailboxes and all your messages will show up correctly. For a little less cumbersome way to do this, you can use the AppleScript included in the download to rebuild all imported mailboxes - please don't interfere with the script's progress until it has finished - the script is using UI scripting which has some issues.”
• Emailchemy: The personal version is $30. It has a wide range of export options.
• eMailman® – Conversion: links to just about every mail conversion option available.

I’ll probably go for one of these four. I want to research a bit more about just what Mail.app’s limits are.