Spinning Yarns

Today, I needed to tackle the problem of how to migrate e-mail from a standard Dartmouth BlitzMail account to the Vox Alumni Network. This seems like it should be fairly straightforward, and it turned out to be mostly so, but I thought I would take the time to document the process, in case anybody else wants to do the same thing. If you’re not from Dartmouth College, you probably won’t find this very useful information.

Disclaimer

Although I have done my best to make the information in this post accurate, I make no warranty that anything here is completely correct. Use at your own risk. That said, if you do find any errors, I would appreciate you letting me know, so that I can try to correct them.

The first problem is how to migrate your saved e-mail messages from one BlitzMail server to another. You could just try forwarding everything, but the “Forward without change” command doesn’t actually forward without change. In particular, it rewrites most of the headers of each message. Also, after you have forwarded everything, you would then have to manually recreate your entire folder structure on the target server. Even though BlitzMail allows only a single level of folder structure, this could be annoying.

The solution I adopted was to use the BlitzMail server’s IMAP/SSL interface. The IMAP interface allows you to access your folder structure, and you can “copy” messages from one account to another. The IMAP interface also provides a convenient way of archiving your messages offline, in the event you have too much saved mail.¹

Since my machine is a Macintosh, I used Apple’s “Mail” application, but the same trick should work with another IMAP/SSL client such as Thunderbird or Eudora. The basic procedure with Mail.app is this:

1. Create an IMAP/SSL setting for your Dartmouth BlitzMail account.
2. Create an IMAP/SSL setting for your Vox Alumni Network account.
3. Sign in to both accounts simultaneously.
4. Drag folders from the Dartmouth account tab to the Vox account tab.
5. Wait around until everything is copied.

Creating a New Account

To create a new account setting in Mail.app, you will need the following information:

• Your full name as it is recorded in the Dartmouth Name Directory. Abbreviations or nicknames will not do here. For discussion, let’s suppose your name is “Ivan Q. Smith”.
• The hostname of your BlitzMail server. If you don’t know what it is, this form should let you look it up (this one should work for the Vox Alumni Network). For discussion, let’s suppose your server is newdancer.dartmouth.edu.
• Your BlitzMail password. I suppose this should be self-explanatory.

In Mail.app, choose “Preferences…” from the “Mail” menu, and select the “Accounts” tab. Click the “+” icon at the bottom left to add a new account. Using the above information, fill in the resulting dialog box like this:

Click “Continue”. Now, fill in the name of your BlitzMail server, your name, and your BlitzMail password in the “Incoming Mail Server” dialog, like this:

Note that you should replace spaces in your name with periods, e.g., Ivan.Q.Smith

Click “Continue” again. The program will attempt to check the IMAP connexion, but this process will fail after a minute or so, because the BlitzMail servers do not understand plain IMAP, only IMAP over SSL. That’s okay—just click “Continue” again. In the next dialog, you can enable SSL by setting up the window as shown here:

Once again, click “Continue”. You will now be prompted to enter an outgoing mail server. This does not matter for the purpose of transferring e-mail between BlitzMail accounts, but if you plan to use this account to send mail as well, you might as well fill it in. Dartmouth users may use mailhub.dartmouth.edu, while Vox Alumni Network users will want mailhub.dartmouth.org. Keep in mind, however, that neither of these servers is likely to accept mail for delivery if you are not inside the Dartmouth network (e.g., via VPN).

Once you are done, you should get an “Account Summary” that shows you what you’ve just entered. Click “Continue” one last time to finish the account creation.

Transferring Messages

Once you have created the accounts you need, log in by choosing “Go Online” from the “Mailbox” menu. You may see a dialog box complaining that the site certificate cannot be verified (“Mail was unable to verify the identity of this server…”). The correct solution to this problem is to install the Dartmouth College root certificate, but that is probably more trouble than it is worth. Instead, just click “Continue” and hope nobody is playing man-in-the-middle and trying to hack your session.

Now, copying most of your folders is easy. On the left side of the mailbox window should be a list containing the two accounts you just created, plus entries for “Inbox”, “Sent”, and “Trash”. Open up the entry for your Dartmouth account, grab whatever folders you want to keep, and drag them to the entry for your Alumni account. The copying process may take a while—you can monitor it by choosing “Activity Viewer” from the “Window” menu.

Unfortunately, copying your In Box is a little trickier, because Mail.app merges the contents of all your In Boxes together into one omnibus view. I found two solutions:

1. If there are no messages in your Alumni account’s In Box, select everything in your Inbox, right-click (or control-click) on one of the highlighted messages, and choose “Copy To” → “Inbox” → “Dartmouth Alumni”.
   Note: The name “Dartmouth Alumni” will be whatever you named your Alumni account entry when you created it.
2. Alternatively, create a new folder in your Alumni account that is distinct from other folders. Drag the contents of your Inbox to this new folder, and wait for them to copy. Then, take the Dartmouth account offline, leaving the Alumni account online. Now, drag the contents of this new folder back to the Inbox.

Other Issues

Another thing you might want to save are your mail aliases. BlitzMail calls these “personal address lists,” and stores them on the server in its own internal format. I tried to find a way to extract these using AppleScript, but gave it up as a bad job. If you’re savvy enough to work a command shell, you can use the listedit script from my Python BlitzMail library to extract them all in a plain text format, and then import them into the other account. Here’s a sample transcript:

 % listedit --dump lists.txt
 Password for Ivan Q. Smith: ********
 % listedit --import --dnd dnd.dartmouth.org lists.txt
 Password for Ivan Q. Smith: ******
 Importing 3 lists loaded from lists.txt
 1. Fools, 3 members
 2. Friends, 3 members
 3. Bob, 1 member

Other than this, the only solution I can think of offhand would be to copy and paste them manually, using two separate copies of BlitzMail open simultaneously. That might be the easiest thing to do if you have only a few mailing lists you want to transfer.

Once you have transferred all your old mail, you will probably want to set up forwarding on the old account, so that messages will go to your new address instead. To do so:

• Log in to your Alumni account (via BlitzMail) and choose “Edit DND Entry…” from the BlitzMail menu. Under “Preferred E-Mail Address” select “BlitzMail” rather than “Host” (the latter is what it defaults to). Click “OK” and log back out.
• Log in to your Dartmouth account (via BlitzMail) and choose “Edit DND Entry…” from the BlitzMail menu. Under Preferred E-Mail Address, make sure “BlitzMail” is selected rather than “Host”. Click OK, then choose “Preferences…” from the BlitzMail menu. Under “Automatic actions” select the checkbox for “Forward all mail to…” and enter your Alumni address (e.g., Ivan.Q.Smith.06@Alum.Dartmouth.ORG). If you like, you can also set up a vacation message here, to let people know your address is changing.

Note

I have assumed that your “Preferred E-Mail Address” in the Dartmouth DND is set to the default (“BlitzMail”), and not pointing somewhere else. If that isn’t the case, you should set it back to BlitzMail. Otherwise, the forwarding scheme described here will not work as intended. If you don’t have a vacation message set, however, you could also point your Dartmouth DND “Preferred E-Mail Address” directly to your Alumni address.

On the other hand, if you just want to download your entire account en masse, you might also find the blitz2mbox script from my Python BlitzMail library useful. It can extract everything in Unix mailbox format, which programs such as Apple Mail and other common mail readers will usually convert into whatever they like to use.

¹ The mailbox quota for Dartmouth accounts is somewhat larger than the quota for Vox Alumni Network accounts, a fact that may complicate migration. If you exceed your quota by too much, you will be unable to send or receive any new messages until you reduce your disk usage.

Update, 08-Feb-2007

One of my fellow graduate students pointed out to me that one of the things this tutorial is lacking is any information about how to set up your SMTP settings, if you are planning to use your Vox Alumni account via a program other than BlitzMail. Unfortunately, I don’t have much good advice on this subject. The primary Dartmouth mail server accepts SMTP authentication, using your name and password from the Dartmouth Name Directory. The Vox Alumni SMTP server, however, does not seem to support the authentication extension, at least as of this writing.

Since I don’t have a solution, I will offer you this advice: Write a polite letter to the office of Alumni Relations and ask them to support SMTP authentication, and meanwhile, investigate the SMTP settings available to you through your local ISP. It is quite possible that the decision to omit SMTP authentication was intentional, but it cannot hurt to ask.

Filed by Michael at 23:40 under Tutorial
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In the process of moving, Sara and I decided it was time for a new vacuum cleaner. The old one is a hard-working yet aged canister model that was given to me by my parents, and I think it was originally purchased sometime around 1978. It used to totally suck, but lately, it has not been doing as good a job as one might hope, particularly in a household with two long-haired humans and a lot of cat fur. I guess a vacuum cleaner is the only thing you get rid of when it doesn’t suck. So, anyway, it’s time for a new one.

After doing a bit of price shopping, we decided to try something a little different—we got ourselves a Roomba. We named it “Plecostomus,” after a common breed of catfish (Hypostomus plecostomus) kept by aquarium lovers.¹ Here you can see a picture of him, taking a well-deserved drink after his first trip around our living room. He did a good job on the carpet, too, although you can’t really tell that from the photograph.

As you can imagine, Mr. Plecostomus was the subject of some intense feline interest. Friday took one look, narrowed her eyes, and fled the scene entirely (though she was later found napping in the other room, so she couldn’t have been too scared). Simon, on the other hand, prowled around wide-eyed for the first several minutes, until he realized this thing was not going to actually hurt him; then he flopped down in the hall and pretended not to be scared, until it came past him on the way to the kitchen, at which point Simon became intently interested in one of his stuffed mice at the other end of the hall.

In addition to providing entertainment, Mr. Plecostomus did a good job cleaning up the rug, and he did so without any intervention from either of the humans. He can even get under most of the furniture without our help. I didn’t realize quite how nice that could be, till just this evening. Oh, sure, I read all those science fiction stories by authors like Asimov and Williamson, in which robots do all the drudgery and everybody’s happy till the robots wake up to their enslavement and try to take over the world or some such thing. But I never really thought about how pleasant it can be to have a robot to do this kind of work, instead of an ordinary machine. We use machines in our households all the time, of course—dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, air conditioners, irons, etc. But many of them require our supervision to get anything done. A robot is more than just a machine—it’s a machine with a computer attached, so that it can make certain kinds of simple decisions without our intervention. And, gosh, that’s awfully convenient sometimes.

We have thirty days to decide whether we want to keep him around, but so far, our impressions have been pretty good. I still have the trusty old canister vac in the closet, so that we can vacuum things other than the floor, but for now, I think we might well have found a good solution to keeping the carpets clean.

¹ Actually, there are a couple different species that are commonly termed “plecostomus.” One is the aforementioned H. plecostomus himself; the others are somewhat more decorative cousins known as Liposarcus multiradiatus and Liposarcus pardalis.

Filed by Michael at 21:13 under Personal
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I first moved to Hanover, New Hampshire on a warm mid-September day in 1989. I was seventeen years old, and the majority of my belongings fit into a single carful as measured by my parents’ Subaru station wagon. Seventeen years later, on a sunny June afternoon, Sara and I moved from Hanover to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our stuff no longer fits into a single car, although thanks to the swift and skillful efforts of the movers we hired, it occupied a much smaller volume of the moving truck than I ever would have anticipated based on the number of boxes we had packed. It’s a good thing that book collecting isn’t considered dangerous, or we would both have to sign up for Bookaholics Anonymous. We bought fifty small sized moving boxes to assist in our packing, and figured we’d have plenty unused ones to return at the end. There were only four empties left when we were done, and well over half of what we used was filled with books—I think we counted thirty-five boxes of them.

We hired a professional moving company to pack up our kitchen and breakable stuff, and to shlep everything onto and off of the truck. Two guys arrived on Tuesday to do the packing, and while they did that, Sara and I packed the rest of our stuff—mostly books, as I said, plus a bit of food and clothing. We had most of it done by Tuesday night, or so we thought. On Wednesday, however, we had a refresher course in the old folk wisdom: The first 90% of a job takes the first 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% of the job takes the other 90% of the time. I didn’t think we had all that much stuff stored in the basement, but it turned out to be quite a job to get it all out. The cardboard boxes had succumbed to the damp, so we had to recycle most of them, and much of what was left had a great deal of mildew on it. We had to discard what we couldn’t salvage. Throughout the day and late into the night on Wednesday, we kept feeling as if we were just about done, and then finding another box or two of stuff that had to get packed.

We had to stay up pretty late to do it, but when Thursday morning arrived we were really truly done packing, so that by the time the movers arrived we were able to sit back and read our books as they carried everything out to the truck. For as much stuff as we seemed to have during packing, it sure didn’t take up much space in their truck! They finished loading in about an hour and a half, and our whole apartment took up maybe the front third of its cargo space. Sara had already prepared the back of my car for its feline cargo, so then we loaded up our suitcase, locked the apartment, and drove to Cambridge. Hiring movers wasn’t cheap, but boy, it sure was worth it. Once we all arrived, the unloading took maybe an hour at most, and everything went smooth as silk, and not one thing lost or broken. What’s more, much of our clothing got to stay in the dresser drawers, so our “unpacking” was even further simplified.

We spent the rest of Thursday unpacking. I tackled the kitchen, while Sara unpacked our clothes and set up the bathroom. In unpacking the kitchen, I learned how it is that movers can stow away dishes so quickly and in such a small space, without them breaking. The trick seems to be to use vasty quantities of clean white newsprint-grade paper. By the time I got done unpacking the dish barrels (so called), there was a mountain of paper nearly up to my shoulders in the living room. I stuffed it all back into the empty boxes—it barely fit—and carried the whole lot down to the recycling center in the bottom of the parking garage. This was more complicated than it seems, for although there is a bank of three elevators in our building, only one of them actually goes to the lowest level of the garage. Ordinarily this does not matter, since you can just walk down a few flights of stairs if you get the wrong elevator, but when you are carrying heavy boxes full of paper, you’d really rather use the lift. But when you push the “down” button, you get whichever car happens to be closest to you, not necessarily the one that goes to the basement.

In the end, I had to trick the system a bit: I would call for a downward-bound car, and when a car arrived that wasn’t the one I wanted, I reached in and sent it up to the 20th floor, waited for it to leave, then called for another downward bound car. I could also have walked to the bottom level, called the (one) car that goes there, and then ridden it up empty, but I considered my solution more entertaining (and hopefully I didn’t cause other people too much trouble). Even so, it took me several trips to get all the recyclables shifted. Fortunately, they have lots of high-capacity paper receptacles down there, so I was able to make it all fit without too much effort.

On Friday, we went back up to Hanover to do a final clean on the old apartment, and to get our stuff out of the refrigerator and freezer. We borrowed a big cooler and some freezer packs, and drove back north. The weather was somewhat beastly, particularly in regard to humidity, but otherwise it was a pleasant enough trip. Sara had a prior commitment to a job for Friday evening, so I kept myself occupied by vacuuming out the apartment, cleaning up a few last-minute items, and running some errands in town. She had to pull the same gig on Saturday, so we slept in sleeping bags in the empty apartment, and spent much of Saturday afternoon trying not to move around too much. When her job got out around half past midnight, we loaded up the refrigerables, and drove back to Cambridge, arriving sometime around 3am. This whole excursion was very weird, because we’d spent one night at our new place, which is unfamiliar but has all our stuff in it, followed by two nights in our old place, which is familiar, but was empty. By the time we woke up again late Sunday morning, I think we were both pretty confused, but at least it was good to be done moving.

So, here we are, and that’s that. I’ll probably write some more later about the experience of learning to navigate around the greater Boston area, whose roadways seem to have been designed by people with a strong distaste for clearly-marked streets and intersections. “If you know where you’re going, you don’t need signs,” they say, “and if you don’t, why should we bother helping you?” Getting lost must build character or something—although I think I’d rather just eat my vegetables. Anyway, that’s a story for another day.

Filed by Michael at 20:33 under Personal
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