Fixes needed for Importing Witcher (as at Pandora 3.9.1)

Brana, it's great to see that the Importing Witcher has been enhanced in version 3.9.1 (January 7th 2022).  

My importing phase is well behind me now (some nine months ago), and before I lose all recollection of what happened back then I'd like to comment about my experience and ask if the issues I encountered have been resolved in the Witcher so that others don't suffer the same fate.

(1) MAILBOX COLUMNS

I had many hundreds of mailboxes in Eudora, and they all were imported and created in Pandora with the default mailbox columns. However, I didn't want Pandora's  default of displaying column headings, some of which I rarely use and therefore want to hide those columns across the vast majority of mailboxes. It wasn't until the importing process ended (over 18 hours) that I found out what had happened, meaning that I've had to laboriously deselect the identical set of unwanted columns the first time that I opened each and every mailbox inside Pandora (quite a big effort, plus RSI).  

I recommend that people should be warned by the Importing Witcher to select the default mailbox columns BEFORE they import any messages. The procedure is shown in in screenshots, steps (1) and (2).

                        

I also recommend that a new tool be added that will apply the mailbox columns selected in screenshot (2) across all mailboxes. A tool like this would have saved me hours of effort (spread over months, as I kept opening mailboxes for the first time in Pandora).


(2) MAILBOX NAMES INCORRECTLY HANDLED BY THE IMPORTING WITCHER

Over several decades of Eudora use I created mailboxes with names that were not plain text but were meaningful to me, but which led to importation problems:

• Sometimes with special characters to act as "eye catchers" (such as underscore or space character or #  or $  or  @  or whatever), which were allowed in Eudora but were deemed invalid by Pandora )invalid Windows folder name error). This caused glitches in the importing process that -- spread over hundreds of mailboxes, at several levels -- took quite some effort to manually rectify.
  
• Sometimes they reflected website domain names (for example domain1.com or domain2.com.au), and the Importing Witcher wrongly dropped the dots out of the mailbox names (for example domain1com and domain2comau respectively), which was confusing and also caused some issues with imported filters. This importer bug definitely needs fixing.
  
  

Tony Austin said:
I also recommend that a new tool be added that will apply the mailbox columns selected in screenshot (2) across all mailboxes.

Such a tool would be better if it could apply an arbitrary set of mailbox column choices (not necessarily the defaults) across a selected set of mailboxes.  I've found in the past that the choices I wanted for, say, folders of mail-list mails might be different from those for general mails.  And eg those for emails from specific companies might be different again - eg there'd be no point in wasting column space for details of the sender because every single one would be the same eg "PR person at suchandsuch.bank.com".

Right, these are default values (used on creation). So new option would be useful, along the lines:

Apply these column-settings (right now, not as default values) to checked mailboxes.

Brana, applying against checked mailboxes would be a good option for such a tool. There would be times. such as right after running the Importing Witcher. that you would want to use it against all mailboxes rather than selected ones, just like like the way you can make a search run against all mailboxes by selecting the root Pandora folder.

This is done now, launch via Tools/Mailbox Summaries Tool menu.

Note - Template mailbox is the one atop of z-order, that's active mailbox window right before you click Tools/Mailbox Summaries Tool.
You can change template mailbox by opening it (or by bringing window to the front) you don't have to close/re-open Mailbox Summaries Tool.
Bring Mailbox Summaries Tool to the front and mailbox window "right behind it" becomes new template-mailbox, which is also reflected on UI (labels and check-boxes).

Brana, the above new tool works very well, many thanks.

I have a similar suggestion for globally (like Eudora) changing the View > Text Size value across all (or selected) mailboxes.

That's because I want to conserve precious mailbox real estate. My preference is for each and every message summary to be in a small font ... View > Text Size > Small ... and it would be very useful not to have to keep doing this individually and laboriously across hundreds of mailboxes. Since I still have to do this for quite a few mailboxes, I hope that you will add a tool to do so (and anything similar/related that comes to your mind).

Mailbox real estate, Pandora is extremist when it comes to that. This is done now.

Thanks, Brana. I hope that new Pandora users who use the Importing Witcher to migrate from Eudora (or whatever) have a better experience than mine -- which on the whole was good, except for a few big bumps in the road.