I finally wrote the program to convert my Outlook address book to the format for PocoMail (see July 2).  It only took an hour or so to modify an old Delphi program that I used to do some spelunking in my Outlook mailbox a while back.  That was the easy part.  The more difficult task will be getting the mail messages (about 75 megabytes worth) out of Outlook and into the mbox format that PocoMail uses.  I’m of two minds about that mbox format.  Although I’m glad that PocoMail’s creators decided to go with a standard mail file format, I’m disappointed that it had to be mbox.  But then, there probably isn’t another format that’s even close to as widely supported.  The only two things mbox has going for it are its wide support and being a text-only format.  The format is somewhat difficult to parse, and very difficult to create reliably, taking into account all of the special processing rules required for storing textual information in a text-only format.  They really should have allowed for control characters to signify the end of a message.  It’s going to be an interesting exercise, getting all of these messages over.  I’ll update my progress here when I spend a little more time on it.