Mailboxes not imported properly from Eudora

I imported accounts from Eudora, and most mailboxes imported their contents, but several did not.

Analyzing the failure, I see that all the mailboxes that failed to import had an exclamation mark prepended (eg. !Friends Family) to put them at the top of the mailbox list.

This worked fine in Eudora, but does Pandora not allow exclamation marks in mailbox names?

And how do I efficiently recover from this importing failure?

I find no guidance in Help, so many Thanks for any advice here!

  -Harry

If there is no mailbox titled !Friends Family or _Friends Family, under "Import/Local Mailboxes - Eudora", try this:
1. Go back to Eudora, create brand new mailbox "Friends Family", copy messages from "!Friends Family" to "Friends Family".
2. Inspect "Friends Family" make sure there are no corrupted messages.
3. Compact mailboxes, close Eudora, try import again.

Apparently the Pandora importer does not like Eudora mailbox names prepended with an exclamation mark "!".

I renamed the Eudora mailboxes by deleting the exclamation marks, imported, and the mailboxes and contents imported just fine.

Other such symbols will cause this problem too. I found out the hard way, since I had multiple mailboxes with names that Eudora allowed but which the Importing Witcher did not migrate.

One thing is that some of my mailboxes in Eudora were named after a relevant domain name., such as "somedomain1.com" and "somedomain2.com.au" for example. These were imported with the dots missing from the names. such as "somedomain1com" and "somedomain2comau" and this caused problems with imported filters for the mailboxes, which took quite a while to fix as I encountered them from time to time over the first few months of using Pandora.

Pandora is much more restrictive than Eudora regarding the characters allowed in a mailbox name.

You should use Eudora's rename function to remove dots and various other characters before running the Importing Witcher.

Try creating a new mailbox in Pandora, entering such "unusual" characters in the mailbox name, and you'll quickly find out whether Pandora allows that character for mailbox name!.

You can use dot in mailbox names (Importer is more restrictive - so when import is done just correct the names).
As you know Pandora's mailboxes are files, and there are 9 characters that in Windows you can not use in file names (\/:*?"<>|), aside from that and few other minor rules sky is the limit.

For example, you can name your mailbox like this メールボックス (it's mailbox in Japanese). You have over million Unicode symbols and characters that you can use in mailbox names.

I'm preparing to import from Eudora. I have some folders and mailboxes with underscore _ as the first character (to control sort order). Will that be a problem?

Tony Austin had a good suggestion in his March 14 reply:

"try creating a new mailbox in Pandora, entering such "unusual" characters in the mailbox name, and you'll quickly find out whether Pandora allows that character for mailbox name!."