About

I'm an MSP technician first, hobby developer second. I've always been lazy and fond of automation, so over the years I've collected and built tons of one-off scripts, half-baked code that just kind of worked, and a fair few scars from the messy trenches of mail and domain migrations.

My vision for continumail.com is a one-stop shop for individuals and IT professionals alike, for anything mail and migration related. Right now I'm working on ContinuMail Converter. The goal is a full, free and open-source alternative to the predatory conversion tools that dominate this space. We're a long way from that. Today the tool reliably converts .mbox files to .pst at high fidelity: it preserves your mail faithfully, though it's not byte-perfect surgical reconstruction. Point it at a whole Thunderbird profile and it now also carries across the tags, flags and folder structure a bare mbox loses, turning your Thunderbird tags into Outlook categories. So far it's only been tested on a limited amount of data from a couple of sources, Google Takeout and Thunderbird. Apple Mail is next up.

I expect it to stay in 0.x.x for a good while. Not because feature-enriching it or wiring in new formats like .eml and .msg is some engineering feat (it already understands and parses MIME well), but because the whole focus right now is resilience. Writing the .pst is the genuinely hard part, and I'm aiming for absolute fidelity, so precautions and "what if's" come first. The plan is for the first v1 release to have.pst writing nailed down, with an extensive test and error-handling suite behind it. Once that's solid, coupling in other formats should be trivial.

Because correctness comes before polish, the CLI tends to be further ahead on features than the desktop app. If you're a power user who wants the advanced options, the full instructions live on the GitHub page.