Under the heading "I tried it already and it didn't work": Emailchemy, for example, didn't work in my situation. I might have used it for part of the process, but after looking at it, I realized it would have taken me as much work as I wound up doing anyway, plus I would have had to pay for it. I actually contacted Emailchemy's tech support to confirm this before I moved on. Apple offers the AppleScript utility for free, and I had high hopes for it, but I couldn't make it properly address the other tools involved. As it was, I wasted half a day playing with both AppleScript and BBEdit's TextFactory scripting facility before I opted to cut my time losses and solve the problem in the fastest, if least attractive, way. (But I'll come back to an AppleScript-based solution in a bit.)

Many people wrote me to suggest easy ways to convert line endings in text files. I actually didn't have any trouble with that aspect of the chore. Several products do that very well. The main problem was getting the Mac to open and recognize the Windows-created Eudora mailbox files as Mac Eudora mailbox files. That's two separate problems, actually.

The easier problem to figure out was how to make the Mac associate Windows-based .mbx (Eudora Mailbox files) with Mac Eudora, so that the Mac can finally recognize them. It was just counterintuitive. The trick is to preserve the Windows file extension. I came across forum posts and help sites that gave me this technique; it's apparently needed more frequently under OS X than earlier Mac system software versions. It was an easy process to use the Mac's Get Info facility for one of these files and apply the Eudora association to all files with that extension.

The second problem -- that the Mac and its apps would not recognize these files (I couldn't open them in any application, and they appeared grayed out in File Open dialog boxes) -- took a bit longer to figure out. The only program with which I was able to open these files successfully was the TextWrangler (or its big brother, BBEdit) text editor. To open them in BBEdit, I had to drag and drop the .mbx file icons onto the BBEdit program icon. And it wasn't until I saved these mailbox files with BBEdit that the Mac began to recognize them. (Note: I tried several other text editors, and none of them solved the problem.)

I decided to use BBEdit to set the new line endings because it was easy enough to do once I was in there. Besides, I found that text encoding was an issue with about 10 percent of my mailbox files, which required me to mess around in there anyway. Another 10 percent had a file-name length problem, requiring me to shorten the file name on the Mac. Since I had to work manually on some aspects anyway, it just made more sense to do everything in one place instead of running through separate batch processes.