Import / Export

How to get data in and out of Scribe

Scribe supports a few different standard email and contact formats. So it's usually possible to bring across the data from your old client into Scribe. To a lesser degree you can sometimes take your email and contacts with you to your next client, should you have to stop using Scribe.

So this section will help get you started with importing and exporting. Firstly quite a bit of the import / export is based around drag and drop. Scribe takes it's drag and drop quite seriously so there is often 2 ways to do something, using the menus or drag and drop. For instance, you can drag a folder, an email or a contact onto anything that accepts files and Scribe will export the object in a standard text file format. The mappings between file and internal object are as follows:

Scribe Object	Mime Type	File Extension
Email	message/rfc822	.eml
Folder of Email	text/mbox	.mbx (Mbox)
Contact	text/x-vcard	.vcf (vCard)
Calendar Appointment	text/calendar	.ics (vCal)

Drag and drop can be used to import AND export all these types of files. In the case that your importing, drop the file into the actual folder in the main window's tree view that you want to import to. If the incoming file is a MBOX folder then all the mail inside will be imported into the destination folder, ie. it won't create a subfolder to import to, you have to do that. When exporting MBOX there is a small delay as the MBOX file is created for the folder being dragging, during this time a progress window will show you how it's going. Just keep the mouse button down until the MBOX is created and then once it's done, drop it where you want to export to.

You might find this obvious, but an Email window can accept files dropped onto as attachments. This means that you can treat it like a folder, dragging files to and from it to import and export them. This is quite powerful, like you could send someone your schedule for next week, this would be as simple as selecting all the appointments for next week in the calendar view and dropping them straight onto the mail to that person.

Outlook Express

Import Mail

Outlook Express (OE) stores mail in 1 of 2 proprietry mail box formats. Both are partially supported by Scribe. I say partially because the formats are not published, I can't be certain that my code will read them correctly. That said in most cases the import will work fine. But if not then I can't help you. To attempt an import directly from OE's MBX (which aren't MBOX) or DBX files use the Tools->Import->Outlook Express->MBX or DBX menu items.

There is another way to import mail from OE, and that is via .eml files. When you drag an email from OE to a folder it will export it as an .eml file. Which Scribe will happily import, in fact you can select all the email in an OE folder and drop it straight onto a Scribe folder and it gets converted via .eml files into Scribe objects.

Export Mail

Exporting mail back to OE can only be done through the drag and drop interface, by dragging email from Scribe main window list view straight into the list view area of OE. This will import mail into the currently selected folder of OE.

Import/Export Contacts

OE contacts are natively exported an vCard files. So the easy way to move Contacts between OE and Scribe is again via drag and drop. Both applications support receiving vCard's as dropped files. So open the Address Book in OE and select the /Contacts folder in Scribe. To import, drag the contact from OE's Address Book onto the Contacts folder in Scribe. To export, drag the Contact from Scribe onto OE's Address Book.

OE can also export Contacts as CSV files, so if you want to bring across contacts as a CSV file see the section on Contacts section below.

Microsoft Outlook

Import Mail

The support for reading Outlook data into Scribe is supplied via the MAPI library in Windows so it's only available in the Win32 port. To bring the whole PST file across in one hit, use the Tools -> Import -> Outlook(MAPI) -> Email menu. This is foolproof though, and it crashes on some systems. Alternatively you can import by dragging email straight from Outlook into a Scribe folder. This uses different code and can work when the menu options crashes.

Import Contacts

Firstly try the Tools -> Import -> Outlook(MAPI) -> Personal Address Book. Alternatively you can try exporting contacts from Outlook as a CSV file. To do this click File -> Import and Export in Outlook, Select "Export to a file...", Select "Comma Separated Values (Windows)", Select the folder that contains your contacts, select a tempory file to store the data. Then import the file using the standard CSV import procedure.

Eudora

Import Mail

Use File -> Import -> Text -> Unix MBOX and browse to Eudora's directory. Select the .mbx files.

Import Contacts

Use File -> Import -> Eudora -> Contacts.

Mozilla

Import Mail

Use File -> Import -> Text -> Unix MBOX and browse to Mozilla's directory. You can find out where Mozilla stores it's email by openning Mozilla Mail, Edit -> Mail Account Settings -> [Your Account] -> Server Settings and it's down the bottom called "Local Directory".

Import Contacts

The current build Thunderbird uses ldif files to store the address book. Scribe doesn't directly support this format (yet) so you need to convert the file to a format that Scribe can recognise. There are a number of tools to do this but the easiest to use (on windows) is Dawn. Open the Thunderbird LDIF file in Dawn and convert it to CSV. Then follow the CSV import procedure.

For the older built in Mozilla mail client use File -> Import -> Mozilla -> Contacts to import the Mozilla MAB file.

Single email in the form of .eml files can be imported to a folder by dropping the file on the folder. Export can be done by dragging an email from the main window's list view on anything that accepts a dropped file.

Multiple email in the form of MBOX files (.mbx) can be export to a file by dragging the folder onto something that accepts a file. MBOX files can be imported by dropping the file onto a Scribe email folder.

Contacts

Import

Single contacts in the form of .vcs (vCard) files can be imported to a folder by dropping the file on a folder of contacts.

Multiple contacts can be imported from a CSV (comma separated values) file. To import a CSV file of contacts, start with Tools -> Import -> Text -> CSV Contacts. Then select the file to import. Now you have to map all the fields in the CSV file to their Scribe equivalents. The CSV file's fields are listed down the left, and you have to go down the right column, and select a field from the menu by clicking each blank area. If you don't want to map a certain feild just leave it blank. Once the field mapping is done, you can save it to a file if you want to store the mapping you've created by using the "Save" button. Likewise the "Load" button loads a previously saved field mapping and applies it to the list of fields. Once you happy with the mappings you can select an output folder in Scribe using "...". Then click "Ok" to start the import.

Export

Export single contacts by dragging it from the main window's list view to anything that accepts a dropped file.

Export multiple contacts as a CSV file with Tools -> Export -> Text -> CSV Contacts.