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Author Topic: Migrating Email from Earthlink TotalAccess to any other mail client  (Read 9,780 times)

MailQuest

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I bought The Bat, but do not see any feature that allows me to import email from Earthlink TotalAccess which is a horrific program.  I am not married to The Bat and would happily use another email client, but is there anyone who has successfully moved enormous amounts of email from TA to any other program?

TIA

mouser

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i dont know totalaccess, but thebat can import from lots of different formats..
see if there is any "Export" function from totalaccess.

MailQuest

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TotalAccess can export as .dat or .csv.

MailQuest

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Oh, for the record, The Bat does not recognize TotalAccess.  I have spent countless hours with tech support at Earthlink/Sprint.  This is important information for everyone:

TotalAccess has a limit of 1.95 GB for its database.  This has nothing whatsoever to do with leaving mail on the server.  It is the maximum size permitted for a database on the hard drive.

Earthlink hypes this mail client as superior to everything else out there and various people at tech support believe the storage limit is smaller or the same with other mail clients.  Ergo, if the reason for changing is that the box is full, exporting mail will not help unless the new client has a higher limit.

There is no concensus on this.  Some say the limit is determined by the space on the HD, but this appears to be faulty information.  It is a limit in the design of TotalAccess.

Also, I remembered why I didn't buy The Bat months ago when I downloaded it:  it puts mails from each account in a separate place.  Unless there is a way around this, it's cumbersome.

mouser

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seems like it's good you left totalaccess.

2 things:
i saw a hint that you might be able to import the csv mail files into outlook, and then maybe from outlook into thebat.

i have another idea:
it seems like totalaccess people could really use some help getting their emails into a format where they could import them into another email client.

maybe you could export 2 or 3 (needs to be more than one) spam emails with no sensitive information, and export them into a csv file and attach it to a post.  someone here may be able to make a little csv -> unix mailbox format converter. if you have an email with an attachment (picture for example) that would be important.

lastly:
you can pretty easily tell thebat to automatically put all mail from different accounts into one folder.  Pocomail is more directly set up for this kind of thing, and handles it differnetly, but it's really not hard in thebat.  you basically create your different accounts, and then in each one add a filter that says to move all incoming mail into folder XXXX.

MailQuest

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Great.  I will do exactly this.  I have a couple of friends who are as interested in solving the Earthlink TotalAccess problem as I am.  One technical person that I hired for another task called this Trap Ware.  I think "Snare Ware" is a good name.  You probably will not find one good word about this anywhere other than Earthlink's web site.  But, I have not succeeded in leaving yet.  I am simply bent on leaving.

Since you review software, it seems important to address two more issues that arose:  the limits on the database and the impact on RAM.  I found that with all programs closed, just TotalAccess running, it used 480MB of RAM!  One tech support person said, "Oh, you should never have anything else open if you are using TotalAccess."  Like, duh, who ever heard of this before!

mouser

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Oh, you should never have anything else open if you are using TotalAccess

hahahah - sounds like leaving totalaccess could not be done soon enough.
for what it's worth, i leave thebat running 24hours a day.

MailQuest

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Looks like I have to send the attachment to you?

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