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Ever Heard of cc:Mail?
Posted by: l008com on 2016-12-14 23:07:06
I still haven't been able to get this powerbook to power on. So I may never be able to rescue these emails 🙁  
Posted by: IPalindromeI on 2016-12-15 05:08:40
Can't you take out the disk and boot from that on another machine?
Posted by: l008com on 2016-12-15 05:11:18
Nope i have my own unrelated 500 series hard drives that I've never been able to find a way to copy data off of. I tried scsi adapters but they didn't work. In fact I was thinking about using this machine for that purpose. 
Posted by: rsolberg on 2016-12-15 17:16:26
After sacrificing many brain cells to the SCSI gods, I determined that termination of the 2.5" drives seemed to be the critical issue. The 2.5" SCSI drive finally worked when I used a 54 to 50-pin plus power adapter in an external SCSI enclosure that has automatic active termination plugged into my Wallstreet.
Posted by: l008com on 2016-12-15 17:29:43
I'm hoping that some day, someone gives me a WORKING 500 series to recycle. Then I can pop my drives in, copy anything readable off of them, then send it all on it's way. 
Posted by: NJRoadfan on 2016-12-15 18:42:51
I have a working 2.5" SCSI to 50pin adapter here. I don't recall having to do anything out of the ordinary to get it to work on a regular desktop SCSI machine, just make sure the end of the chain is terminated even if its a CD-ROM drive with a termination jumper.
Posted by: l008com on 2016-12-15 18:46:04
I tried that with the one I bought off ebay. It still didn't work so I returned it.
Posted by: Bunsen on 2016-12-19 06:55:16
I have a working 2.5" SCSI to 50pin adapter
Where on earth did you find that?
Posted by: NJRoadfan on 2016-12-20 05:36:08
Ebay of all places. This is what I landed up getting:

http://www.cablesonline.com/25lapscsihar.html

I use it with a Adtron SCSI to CF adapter. The 2.5 to 3.5" SCSI adapter is a passive plug adapter, no electronics, just like their IDE cousins.
Posted by: l008com on 2016-12-20 05:38:31
Ebay of all places. This is what I landed up getting:

http://www.cablesonline.com/25lapscsihar.html

I use it with a Adtron SCSI to CF adapter. The 2.5 to 3.5" SCSI adapter is a passive plug adapter, no electronics, just like their IDE cousins.
Interesting, that was the one I bought but it didn't work with my old small SCSI drives from my powerbook 540s. I guess it's possible both of my hard drives are dead, but seems unlikely.
Posted by: CC_333 on 2016-12-24 07:34:18
I might have an old 520, if you're interested?

I'm not sure if it works, though.

c
Posted by: l008com on 2016-12-24 07:41:45
What I really need is a working power supply i can borrow for a week or so
Posted by: techknight on 2016-12-24 19:06:55
or if you have an old IBM or toshiba power supply, they are usually 15V enough to hack something together to make a blackbird laptop work. Been there, done that. 
Posted by: l008com on 2016-12-24 21:57:00
I've got nothing but modern magsafe power supplies. and I'm also no good at soldering or board level electronics in general. I can't believe I have a need for one of these. I threw two away years ago thinking theres zero chance ill ever need one. 
Posted by: l008com on 2017-02-14 22:07:44
Ok the customer bought ANOTHER powerbook 500 and that power adapter was able to turn on her machine no problem. I copied her hard drive to my 7300 and after copying a system enabler, my fast mac boots right up off her old data!

So, back to the point of all this... how can I get these mails OUT?

It appears that this program lets you print groups of email. I'm going to try to install Acrobat, so I can "print" all these emails to PDFs. I'm not sure it will work, but I'm going to give it a show. 

Separate from that, I'm open to any ideas anyone might have about getting this mail out "for real" and into a modern mail program as real email messages. That would be the ideal way to go but I just doubt it's possible. 
Posted by: IPalindromeI on 2017-02-15 10:53:44
Acrobat will happily spit out PDFs. Print as many emails as you can, and the resulting PDF file will happily load on modern machines. (PrintToPDF or abusing PostScript are free alternatives IIRC)
Posted by: l008com on 2017-02-15 11:00:48
Still trying to get acrobat installed. This on macintosh garden are packaged in the worst possible ways for use on old Macs.

That said, I'm hoping i'll be able to essentially Select All, Print and in one single function, print out all emails as PDFs. As separate documents, not as a multiplage, 3000+ page pdf. Once I get Acrobat installed, we shall see.
Posted by: l008com on 2017-02-15 12:40:02
Ok I managed to get Acrobat and the PDF Writer installed. Some emails print fine, others throw this error:



Trying to print all 2800 messages gives this error too. I have a feeling it's something simple like maybe there are characters in the Subjects it doesn't like. But theres no easy way (or possibly even hard way) to fix that. I'll have to poke around with it some more.

Meanwhile, I'm also open to any ideas for ways to migrate this mail data to a mail system that I could ultimately get into a modern mailbox. PDFs would suffice, but actual emails would be better. 

And on that note, cc:Mail Remote 2.0 © 1992 is NOT scriptable, so there goes that thought. 
Posted by: l008com on 2017-02-15 14:52:57
Also I had downloaded ccMail 6 from that lotus FTP site referenced a few months back. But turns out the files were corrupt. And now I can't find it anywhere on there.  :-/

Posted by: l008com on 2017-02-15 16:11:04
Ok here is the odd situation I'm in.

Lotus's FTP site does not like Fetch, but the Finder worked well enough, and I was able to get ccMail 6.1 PPC Mac. So I installed it. Of course it didn't make an enclosing folder, so it just dumped all of its files right into my Applications folder. But once I cleaned that up, I am able to open the program....

but ccMail is not a normal mail program. When you open it, the first thing it does is ask you for a login and password. There is no server. It's weird. I am able to "pick" my post office, and I can select the local files from the ccMail 2 data files. That might actually work, but here's the catch. Even though it's local mail, you still need to log in with a username and password to access it. ccMail 2 is still auto-filling the username and password from 25 years ago. I'll need to type it again fresh for ccMail 6. But I don't know it. And the customer doesn't know it. So this looks like it might be a dead end all over again. Plus it looks like this version of the app IS scriptable! If only it worked. 
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