Yep, Windows Still Sucks

[ rakaur on Sun Aug 03 at 09:51 AM // category: apple, microsoft, software, technology ]

Just in case you were wondering. Let me share a tale with you.

A week or so ago my laptop’s hard drive died. I am currently poor, so that means my laptop is out of commission. This also means the only computer I have available to me is running Windows XP. And I am sad.

Since I was stuck with using Windows, I was left without my beloved Apple Mail. Since Dreamhost’s server-side mail filters catch next to nothing, I was relying on Mail’s client-side filter, which itself isn’t that great. Without even that, though, it was impossible to wade through my inbox. I’ll not shame Outlook’s spam filter with a mention.

So, I decided to move my mail from Dreamhost to “Google Apps.” I figured I’d move it over, use gmail’s web interface until I got my laptop back up, then enable IMAP within gmail and use Mail as normal, with the added benefit of Google’s spam filter, which is excellent. This in itself was not difficult.

The difficultly lies in the fact that I have around 10,000 emails, and I wanted to keep them. Not as easy.

  1. First attempt: Use Outlook Express to IMAP to my current mail, sync to the server that has all my mail, change the account settings to the new mail, then sync back to the server. This was made impossible by the fact that somehow, OE was already resolving the new gmail records in DNS, but Outlook wasn’t. Okay, so…

  2. Second attempt: Try the above with Outlook instead of OE. Well, for some reason, Outlook refused to download all the mail. Every time it tried to sync it failed miserably, usually freezing. Why? Because Windows software sucks.

  3. Third attempt: Use Google’s own free thingy to upload my mail from OE to Google. This took an amazing six fucking hours and still only managed to upload a fraction of what it said it did, so I had to discard it all and try again.

  4. Fourth attempt: Okay, fine. I have a copy of my mail already stored locally, because I have backups of Mail’s directory. Mail stores all of this bullshit in some .emlx format, which nothing reads, but is apparently the same as .eml for some reason, but not really, because after I spent two hours importing them into OE after renaming them (at least not by hand, thankfully) only about half made it, and only a fraction of those were readable.

  5. Fifth attempt: All of my mail was stored in Maildir format on a Unix host. Okay, so I should be able to just download that directory to Windows, and import it into Outlook, then sync up to the Google servers. Whoops, not only do neither OE nor Outlook import Maildir, but I can’t even copy the directory to Windows because the file names in that format have colons and commas, and Windows doesn’t like that one bit.

  6. Sixth attempt: Okay, so now I need to find some free Unix tool that converts Maildir to mbox. That sounds simple enough, but none of the ones I found in the first decade came close to working properly. This took almost three hours to find, and another hour to convert all my mail. So now I wait for the 200mb to download to Windows, and try importing mbox into Outlook. Wait, Outlook can’t import mbox, but OE can. Seriously? Okay, import mbox into OE, then import from OE into Outlook. Hey, it worked! Wait, why do I have like ten of every message? Because Windows software sucks. So I figure there must be some Outlook plugin that can delete duplicate messages. As it turns out, there’s a thousand of them, and they all cost $40. Why? I seriously searched for a few hours for these things, and they all cost money. The two free ones I found didn’t actually work. I briefly considered writing some Windows-bastard script to do it, but then I remembered—oh wait—I’d rather die. Eventually I found a free one that actually worked. Then I told Outlook to sync, and after an hour or so, all of my mail was finally at Google.

This took almost six or seven collective hours to accomplish. This would have taken ten minutes with Apple Mail. I would have sync’d, waited for the DNS to update, then sync’d again. Boom, done. Windows is the woman of operating systems: always doing things the hard way.

-- rakaur // 2008.08.03 @ 09:51 AM

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