Claws for 12.0 worked well and it was very reassuring to be able to see the /home/mail and even open an individual mail with a text editor. But the IMAP function did not work and I tried to go to Slack 12.2 . But the DHCP function would not work and so I am now on Slack 12.1 . No Claws Mail for 12.1 apparently? (With or without IMAP functionality.) And Kmail and Tbird "hide" the mails and I do not see how to get them to read my mailboxes. Any ideas?

You can always compile claws-mail from slackbuilds.org. Although the script on SBo is for 12.2, I'm pretty sure it will work on 12.1.

Not sure if I understand that.

TBird and Claws mail work just fine with IMAP and DHCP. I use IMAP with gmail on all of my mail clients. No problems that I'm aware of. Perhaps you need to check your e-mail server settings.

What I mean is that the MH mailbox for Claws is in /home/steve/Mail as a collection of individual text files in the appropriate folders.

I would go for KMail (works with IMAP) but I cannot get it to read from and write to this Mail folder. And I see no point in going to another format and maybe losing info? Same for Tbird

To my knowledge, KMail supports mbox and maildir, but not MH, unfortunately. Few MUAs do, these days, although it is a powerful format. Therefore, there is no one-step solution for your problem.

What I would try, is this: Read in your emails from all your folders with Mutt (console MUA, very powerful, with support for Mbox, MH and Maildir, as far as I know). Then save/export them to an Mbox folder or as plain text. Finally you can import the Mbox folder with KMail.

Of course, before you start, make a backup of the original mail folders.

Good luck!

gargamel

Mutt?

Yes, Mutt.

Just open a console or an xterm or Konsole window and at the prompt type:

Mutt Homepage

gargamel

Mutt works very well if you are not afraid to use a text based MUA.
You can use it with mail in mbox, MH and maildir formats.
It can also connect to an IMAP server without problem (if it is compiled with this option).

How about converting your MH structure to standard Maildir?

This looks relevant
http://osdir.com/ml/kde.general/2002-11/msg00028.html

I had never even heard of MH until you posted this question, MH is out of fashion and support is not going to get any better

David in KL

Interesting. Only question left is, how completeness and correctness of the conversion can be verified, without having to check each individual email message...

gargamel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_synthesis (sentient DSLs are especially interesting here )
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification

Tuxrules - thanks, I may have to try that but then I really need to get my Slack 12.2 sorted (will not connect to the internet at all, Compaq 2120EA, and I have to do a separate post to see anyone can help with this) and so stick to Claws and MH (I understand that the Claws pkg for 12.2 works OK).

Gargamel, Etienne and David in KL - Mutt is something I have to learn, yes. MH format mailboxes seem to me to be such an practical and elegant way of working that I am going to try to stick to this for the moment at least.

AFAIK, maildir does just the same things for you that MH can do. But for many years I preferred MH with Mutt as my preferred MUA, too, as maildir was the Qmail format, and I don't like Qmail, not because it is bad, but because of Professor Bernstein's attitude. I use maildir now, only because KMail doesn't support MH, and KMail is my preferred MUA now.

gargamel