I figured out what I was doing wrong with TextEdit -- you have to check "Ignore rich text commands in HTML files." So now I can edit html files outside of OmniWeb, which is good because I'm probably going to switch to iCab, if I can get iCab working with our proxy server. Although a really nice application, OmniWeb is still too unpolished and annoying. At least with iCab I'm sort of used to it from using it before. Of course I've said this before and still switched back from iCab to Netscape. And there is a version of Netscape, or more correctly Mozilla, for Mac OS X. But I will give iCab a longer tryout this time. Another factor is that I don't want to pay for beta software, or software in general at this point in time.

The next task is to set up mail in the Mac OS X mail application. There is a handy import Mailboxes command to import Netscape, Eudora, Outlook Express, or Emailer folders. Then you choose the home folder of the mailboxes; it lists all the mailboxes you can import, allowing you to select which ones to import; and then it imports the mailboxes. I have dozens of mailboxes and thousands of emails, totalling over 20 MB of material. It only took a couple of minutes to import.

All the mailboxes are copied to the ~/<user>/Library/Mail folder. Which brings up another point: the Library folder holds all the user preferences and even data files. It's a nice, automatic place to put things, and it's cleaner than the Mac OS 9 Preferences folder because every application has it's own folder and you don't get random files scattered in one folder with you not having an exact idea of what application created the files.

In any case, the imported mailboxes are all imported into the first level of the Personal Mailboxes directory, each mailbox prepended with "(Imported)". Unfortunately, I didn't see any way to rename the mailboxes using the Mail application, so I did it manually using the Finder. Hmm, it looks like folders with duplicate names are combined into one folder. Also, every email is marked unread, which is annoying as it's more likely that they would have all been read.

Hey, it replaced "/" with ":". Oh wait, that's only in Mail. It's still / in the Finder. Anyway, I realize that I can create Finder folders and move the mailboxes into them, so much easier than trying to do it in Mail. You can't move mailboxes in Mail to other folders and transferring emails from one folder to another is a bit slow. Good thing I can look at my Eudora folders to see what the old structure looked like, since I can't run Eudora in Mac OS X except for Classic mode which I don't want to start.

Man, I have a lot of junk in my mailboxes, and it's not all that well organized either. Oh well, someday I'll have to go through my email and purge all the stuff I don't need. In the meantime, I have a huge number of filters to recreate. Other things I miss (but will manage without): folders have no visual indicator that they have unread messages, forwarding email is done "the new way" rather than using the forwarding RFC, you can't queue messages for sending (they're sent immediately or you can save them).

So, the last thing to do is add my email accounts, which since I can't remember means I need to restart into Mac OS 9 so I can look them up in Eudora. As with many things about Mac OS X, the Mail application is quite nice and elegant, a nice blend of features without bloat and with an intuitive interface. This is a great application for 80% of users and people who need more power have the knowledge to get a better application.