# Using TrueSwitch to transfer email from/to webmail servers for Linux



## lotuseclat79 (Sep 12, 2003)

Ever since my WinXP Pro SP2 stb'd in June 2006, I have been accessing my email through my ISP webmail server at Earthlink with over 50MB of stored email. Note: I run exclusively in an Ubuntu 8.10 Live CD environment w/ 1GB RAM.

I recently upgraded my 56k modem connection to Verizon FiOS, and had a ton of email to transfer. The only tool out there seemed to be TrueSwitch, or do it the old fashioned way since my Earthlink account subdomain did not appear to be recognized by TrueSwitch. So, first I called Verizon who informed me to visit the TrueSwitch web site where I contacted them by email and explained the problem. They did send back an automated email recommending I check out their FAQ.

The FAQ is at: http://www.trueswitch.com/help , and goto the link entitled: How do I download TrueSwitch? at:
http://www.trueswitch.com/help_support.htm#howdoi

Essentially, it tells you to download their TrueSwitch Wizard from: http://www.trueswitch.com/download_start.htm for which you should save the TrueInstall.exe file on your desktop. Is your desktop clean? - I keep mine clutter free for downloading to it.

The first thing I needed to do was to install wine, and since I run Ubuntu 8.10 Linux in a Live CD environment with 1GB RAM - yes it can be done, but my first try was not successful using the Synaptic Package Manager. You have to follow the directions to include a Debian web site in your repositories with a new signature at the WineHQ website with directions for Ubuntu 8.10. See the link for Ubuntu at: http://www.winehq.org/site/download and follow the directions. There are other directions for Debian, FreeBSD, Red Hat/CenOS/Fedora, SUSE, Mandriva, Slackware, PC-BSD, Solaris, and Windows binary .zips.

Once you reload the Synaptic Package Manager and select wine to be marked for installation, it will then get the proper binaries for wine to be installed from the Debian website.

Following the directions from the TrueSwitch FAQ, I downloaded TrueInstall.exe and ran it under wine. Once you run the TrueInstall.exe executable in wine: $ wine TrueInstall.exe, it will get another file after setting up subdirectories in your home account, and you should see another file named TrueSwitch Wizard on your desktop - it is an ASCII file with information for executing TrueSwitch. Just to note: I normally install tarballs of file upgrades I have already installed in my Live CD environment, but for wine, I hand cobbled my environment to exclude most of what I normally include to save space in my 1GB RAM environment. As it turned out wine only used up about 72-73 MB.

At first run, it looked like a lot of errors were spilling onto my Terminal window, but eventually the TrueSwitch Wizard Gui interface appeared with which to setup the transfer parameters which I selected from the custom features to exercise rather than take the default route. I ignored the error messages.

Much to my surprise, I later in the day checked in to my Verizon email account and found half of my folders with contents there. Apparently, my directories that have long names seems to have blocked any further progress. What I plan to do to get the rest of my stored email, is to visit my old email website and eliminate the directories that have already been transferred, clean up the folders that I do not need, create new folders with shorter names to transfer what I want to keep, and try the process again to get the last of my email transferred.

I'll report back my final status in this thread when I can either verify that my plan worked or it did not.

-- Tom


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## lotuseclat79 (Sep 12, 2003)

One thing that may have occurred to block half of my emails from being transferred may have been that I used a ':' colon character in some of my folder names at that point and TrueSwitch may not allow that kind of name. One folder name that was transferred was 16 characters long - a good sign. I do not know if that is the limit on naming folders or the special character ':' that I used just yet, but soon I will know.

So far, I have renamed and move the corresponding emails into new folders and am deleting folders that I do not want to reduce the load on TrueSwitch. I have yet to crank it up again which I will do sometime this morning in hopes of transferring the remainder of my email from Earthlink's webmail server to Verizon's.

-- Tom


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## lotuseclat79 (Sep 12, 2003)

It appears that the first job is still running, and the second job says it is complete (but the Details say it is still running).

I sent email to TrueSwitch to either kill the first job to allow the second to progress or kill both jobs and then at least have a chance for a third job to succeed. It helps to monitor the job status from the TrueSwitch website, but I had not found it until after I started up the second job.

Oh well, I suppose I have to wait and see, but I'm going to look for a phone number to call if one is available to help move the process along.

-- Tom


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