Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Oh yes, I forgot one more - which seems more complicated and must be a blocker for those which have messages not all written in Latin characters.

While on holidays, I've received several messages with Greek characters (see below for an example - the specific one is a advertisement from the local telco).
When I've received and later they appear fine, but after exporting - importing with the tools here they become somehow unrecognisable and cannot be displayed any more. If you try to view them you get an empty screen and the CPU applet goes to red.

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Dear Friends Finally i could do it of transferring all the SMSs (Sent and Inbox) from my E90 to N900. I followed the below steps

1. Installed PC Suit 7.1 version
2. Connected E90 Phone and took backup of E90
3. Converted the SMS Inbox and Sent items into a CSV file format
4. Restored backup of E90 to N900. This restored only the contacts and calender. For SMS it said the file format of N900 doesnt match with that of E90
5. From this blog i got the utility smsimporter
6. copy all inbox and sent items in single file say name it as sms.csv.
7. default delimiter is , (comma). change this delimiter to ; (semi-colon)
8. When you convert file from E90 the first 2 fields doesnt get missed, where you have to also do the delimeter eg sms,deliver, in case of inbox SMS. This should appear as sms;deliver; after you change the delimeter. In case of sent sms it should appear as sms;submit;
9. Connect N900 device and in the device chose Mass Storage mode
10. open the device folder where you would see the folders like ".docuements", ".images" etc named folder
11. copy file smsimporter and sms.csv (combined inbox and sent sms file)
12. Diconnect the phone from the PC
13. selet xTerminal module from the phone
14. type command cp MyDocs/smsimporter MyDocs/sms.csv . (dot should be there at the end of the command) and press enter
15. In above statement, please follow the cases of MyDocs spelling
16. type command ls -l and press enter. This command will list the files. Here you should be able to see the files which you had copied
17. type command chmod +x ./smsimporter and press enter
18. type command run-standalone.sh ./smsimporter sms.csv and press enter
19. Above command will start importing the SMS, which will give the imported sms displays.
20 Press exit on the command prompt and go to the conversation module. There you should be able to see all the imported SMS.
21 if you have not imported contacts, then in conversation the Sent to & received from numbers will appear. And if you have already imported the contacts, the Sent to and received from name will appear.

Finally i think this should work for all

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Hmm... Messages in the wrong order (Sort by Message ID instead of storage time), unable to delete some SMS messages after the import, some messages are not shown after the import or the conversation application hung up or blocks because of greek charakters. :(

What about writing a own SMS application?

N900 SMS Archiv

Only to store and keep your old SMS messages on the Device. Only to import, view and search. Without the possibility to send or receive a message. (it could easily be possible to import SMS Messages from the N900 datebase to the SMS Archive Application, but not the other way)

Could someone like the Idea? :)

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

@Helmut. Maybe this is close to what you are describing:

https://garage.maemo.org/projects/glogarchive/

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=37907

It's at extras-testing at the moment.

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Hi

Could anyone show me an exactly example of how a csv file of exported sms from a nokia cell looks like?

Because I have to do the same importing sms from a samsung cell...so i guess i have to manually create the csv file i order to use it with the tool of this blog (Samsung PC studio does not export to csv..)

Thanks a lot!

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Taken from a (very) old N90, through the latest PC Suite software:

Number has been edited for privacy.. Original message body:
List delimiter was changed to the pipe | to account for multiple cases of colon and semicolon being used in many of the 2000+ sms's I was importing -- yes, that N90 has been with me and in full use for a long time. ;)

I used the 0.2.2 version posted a few pages back to do this.. It seemed to include all the patches for the several issues people had been reporting, checks for which delimiter is being used, adds the message token so you can remove each individual message from Conversations, etc, etc..

But, since I was importing so many messages, I did run a few tests of my own and found I had to edit my merged csv file to remove all the double-quotes "" in any message body (that the PC Suite software creates whenever a single quote is found) since smsimporter was leaving them in.. In other words, the above test message (deliberately using a semi-colon and a word in quotes) would need to have its csv version converted to the following:

This would be very easy to do in the actual smsimporter code, but it was even easier for me to just use a regexp substitute rule through VIm -- though, if like me you have a good few msgs to import, you might want to do this on a PC and spare the N900 the hassle.

Great community work, everyone.. To all who contributed to this very elegant and fairly easy to use solution, my heartfelt thanks.

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Thanx!

I tried with a test file and everything did go well!

Now I've tried with the good one, the file with all the messages, and the conversation program crashed. I can't open it anymore, "internal error" and the application closes.

I don't know why, but how can i reinstall the standard conversation application? or maybe only delete all the sms...

Please tell me 'cause I'm without sms-application right now.. hm..

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

I tried it, it succeede after a few tries, but now I cannot open any sms, as the conversations program crashes immediately when I try to open it :(

How do I delete all sms databases on n900?

I tried to reflash the firmware using nokia updater but the problem remains.

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

I had the same problem...

The database is stored in home/user/.rtcom-eventlogger/el.db

You can delete the file and a new one will be created..

Now I succeeded importing some sms, but I can't open some messages, while others open without any problem. Any idea?

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

thanks theswiss! you saved my day :)

but after numerous tries I cannot get the smsimporter to import the messages without the conversation program crashing down. so I'm calling it quits for now

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

I have resolved after I changed the semicolons to "I" and removed all ü,ö,ä....remember to delete the damaged el.db after every try. I'm not sure if it's necessary to create a new one before next try, e.g. sending an sms to yourself...
Somehow it worked...hang in there! ;-)

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

didn't work. said file can't be found. :mad:

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

i get the permission denied error, can someone shed some light on this as i'm a complete newbie. i need a step by step how to do this with the commands as i dont know them. alternatively ill pay someone to do this for me if i have to as i really need my messages and am that desperate.

please help

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

I tried several times with and without semicolon and every time I got Segmentation Fault.

Is this due because I'm running the new firmware?

Any help?

Thanks

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Hi,

I finally managed to import most of my messages to the N900, but I also have a few messages containing special characters. Actually the name of the contact who sent the messages contain those special characters.

I am thinking of deleting the name and replacing it with the phone number of the contact but which editing software should I use? Notepad seems to mess with the encoding of the csv file, which software did you use?

Thanks!

Edit: Alternatively you can tell me which encoding I should use when saving in Notepad, I'll be removing all special characters anyway :)

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

OK, I have successfully imported every message I wanted to import.

What I had to do to achieve this was not all that pretty :) Messages from particular contacts refused to open in Conversations and I had to remove the name (most of my messages had the contact name in the CSV file instead of their numbers) and replace them with their phone numbers in +XXXXXXXXXXXX format.

Also as the last 1-2 characters in all messages were omitted, To avoid this problem I added a full-stop, or an exclamation mark at the end of each message in the CSV file(s). I had stripped the number of messages to transfer down to a little more than a hundred so it wasn't all that hard a work for me, but for people with more messages, this would really take a long time to do.

I deleted el.db once again (and for the last time I hope), rebooted the phone, ran the commands in xterm, rebooted again just to be on the safe side and when I opened up Conversations, I had all the messages I needed, and in good shape...

As I've said, my solutions wouldn't be suitable for people with a large number of messages to import. But for smaller numbers, it's certainly doable...

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

I was able to import the message when all the content is in English. If there is some special character, such as Chinese character, the importer threw a 'Segmentation fault' error. And I couldn't open the Converstaions until manually deleting the db. I also tried to save the CSV file in UTF-8 format. The importer exited without doing anything.

Is there any solution for the non-ASCII characters? Thanks!

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Concerning the national characters issue, I haven't tested this out but here is a thought:

I've just read "The sqlite3.exe command-line doesn't do UTF-8 or UTF-16, it does whatever encoding your computer is configured for."

If I am correct N900 is in UTF-8, so the problem with national characters is on the side of the csv file (which is in in a custom encoding).

On this site: howto convert iso-8859-1 charset html files into utf-8 charset files
is in my opinion the solution.

In the terminal execute (Instead of CP1252 should be your national characters encoding):

This should be on one line.

To check if your national language characters converted to UTF-8 correctly, type:
and review the output if national characters appear.

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Hi Robb, thanks for the advise. Actually before copying the CSV file to N900, I already converted it to UTF-8 in Notepad++ on an XP machine.

When I ran the importer application, it exited straight away without any error message.

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

I figured it out. The trick is the CSV file must be encoded in UTF-8 without BOM rather than UTF-8.

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

For those who don't understand:BOM - Byte Order Mark

What this means:
In Windows most people edit their files in Notepad.
Unfortuantly what Notepad does for a UTF-8 file is save 3 strange charactes at the beggining -  (i+umlaut, double right guillemet, inverted question mark)
These characters are invisible when viewing/editing in Notepad.

I attached a file which has these symbols.
To view if a file has these symbols you can do:
just replace for bom.txt the name of your file.

So question is how to easily remove the BOM?

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Hi guys,

thanks a lot for everyone who contributed to this thread. I successfully imported 2000+ messages from my N95 and here are some of the things worth mentioning:

1- Which delimiter to use: I used the "|" letter (shift + \). Mainly, pick something you think won't appear in any of your text messages.

2- which binary to use: I used Ziller's binary from post #104 in this thread.

3- sorting messages: I sorted the messages based on time, putting the oldest ones at the beginning of the file, and the most recent files towards the end. To do this, I first rearranged every line so that the time was in the beginning, then I sorted the lines, then I rearranged every line again so that the time is in the right place. I used macros in Emacs (an editor) to do this.

4- I deleted all the lines that started with "mms" (only had two).

5- For the encoding, I have some Arabic messages. I first renamed the .csv file to .txt and opened it in Mozilla Firefox on my computer. I went to the "View->Character Encoding" tab in the menu and selected "Unicode (UTF-8)". I was able to see the Arabic text just fine. This means that the file was already UTF8 encoded. Note that I never editted the file in Notepad, and Firefox won't change encoding for you, it will only allow you to see what encoding the file has. To change encoding, see Robb's post (the 4th post before mine).

6- If this is your first time doing this, skip this step. Having done this twice before with failed results (using older binaries), I had to delete my el.db file on the device. This file's path is /home/user/.rtcom-eventlogger/el.db I rebooted after deleting it.

7- I followed the instructions, copied sms.csv and the binary to my phone using Mass Storage mode, copied them one level up to /home/user from /home/user/My Docs, enabled the +x bit on the binary using chmod, and ran the binary.

Results:

It took a long time to finish mainly because it printed every message to the screen. But, I now have all my messages in the conversation app sorted correctly, with names from the address book appearing correctly. Arabic font is there and looks great. I can delete individual messages.

Thanks a lot everyone!

Now, Nokia, wouldn't you want people to say thanks to you too? Why don't you go ahead and release an update to PC Suite that saves us all this trouble :)
I deleted all the MMS messages from the .csv file (there were only two). I also have some Arabic text in my messages, but it turned out that the encoding was UTF8 to begin with. To verify that, I

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Hi,

I'd first like to thank those who contributed into the development of the importer. It would truly help me.

I came across a problem though. I've typed in

cd /home/user
cp MyDocs/smsimporter MyDocs/sms.csv .
chmod +x smsimporter
run-standalone.sh ./smsimporter sms.csv

but it gives no response. It just takes me to the next line. What could be the problem?

If I type run-standalone.sh ./smsimporter only, it gives me this,
Usage: smsimporter <input csv file>
ex. smsimporter backup.csv
It's telling me to do exactly what I did before where I received no response.

The delimiter I am using is a semicolon which got rid of the segmentation fault. So what could be the problem here?

I'd really appreciate help on this matter.

Thank you!

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

It's about the third time I've read this topic and I'm still without results.

I've tried:
resolving semicolon issue. sms.csv is saved with semicolon ;
Tried the different versions of code (with cp, without, did it about 20, 30 times).
Opened sms.csv in excel, saved it. Did it in Wordpad, notebook. Did that for the semicolon-issue and UTF8 issue

Still no results. Sometimes it looks like it's going well, no errors but no conversations either. Sometimes "Error parsing line" errors, Sometimes segmentation fault (with semicolon!). I'm a noob on Linux, so half the code I've typed I don't understand.

Please, help me! What on earth am I doing wrong?

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

haha!! I succeed!!

parsing errors mean your csv line is not correct!
count your column and verify there is enough ; and ".You should have 8 columns!
here is an example of right lines :

sms;submit;"";"12345";"";"2010.04.07 00:00";"";"Tu t'en sors?"
sms;deliver;"12345";"";"";"2010.04.07 00:01";"";"oui enfin"



if your using linux edit your csv files with gedit or an other text editor that manage replacement of strings it is quicker! and better!

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Hi.

LIke many others I'm surprised that Nokia and the developer-team haven't fixed this problem for us, but more I'm impressed by the effort from volounteers like many of you. Thanks for the effort.

I'm new in the forum, but I've followed you guys for some time. I'm also a novice to Linux and the N900 but I'm trying :-)

So far I've (finally) succeeded in getting the smsimporter to act at all. I seem to do the right things but the final step (run-standalone etc.) results in 47 lines of parsing error (I've 47 sms I'm eager to import).

I've edited my .csv file in Notepad, ensuring there are the right number of columns and quotation marks in the right places. I've deleted the international dial number (45 in Denmark) from the phone numbers leaving 8 digits. I've saved the edited .csv-file in UTF-8. And I have followed the otherwise well-written to-do lists to the dot.

Being new to both LInux and N900 this occationally becomes a bit tiresome, but on the other hand it's also challenging and fun. Only re-re-reading this thread I can't seem to find more things I can do.

Can any of you guys help me out?

Thanks in advance

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

After half an hour of work... nothing...
First I couldn't open it
Second it can't be found
third, it finishes without succes

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

@jb900
chek there is " everywhere it should be

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Hey guys,
Thanks alot to everybody for all the info.
Finally managed to get my messages from my N95 to the N900!

however, the imported messages (wich are older then the ones on my n900) are showing first when I open the conversation box. They should be all the up, not directly there :/


Is there any way I can move all the imported messages up in the conversation box?

Kind regards and again a big thanks to everybody

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Hi Djoen,

It's a known Bug. Look here: Bug #7512

Please sign up at Bugzilla and Vote for the Bug if you want it fixed. (this could took a while) - But please, no Comment is needed expect useful informations that could help to fix it. :)

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Hi all,
just wanted to say thanks for this awesome app. Took me some (wel with my linux knoledge lots) of fiddling but i got it to work.

Here were some of the problems i ran into.
- i copied the sms.csv and smsimporter to the mydocuments folder, then tried to add the -x (with chmod) but turns out that won't work in the mydocs folder so i had to copy it to /home/user/
- After i imported the messages lots of them wouldn't work, turned out nokia messaging center saved some of them, not with the phone number but just the contact name. These turned up as doubles in my conversations app on the n900 and wouldnt open (it gave me the message invalid number). What i did was open up the sms.csv with notepad++ and checked all of the entries, if i found one with a name instead of number i selected it ->ctrl+f -> replace all with the correct number (of course keeping the "" intact). luckily i made a backup before importing all the messages the first time, so i deleted all of them in the conversations app, restored the backup and imported them again with the self-corrected sms.csv file (which took a while with 1000+ messages :p) but this time importing worked like a charm!

Thanks again for this app, somehow i just love to keep my messages with me all of the time (a)

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Can anyone please say how the sms.csv should like in notepad?
I will import the messages from the N95 again, convert it right with notepad and then try again.

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

@robnas
for me it worked when it looked like this:

hope it helps. (i edited it with notepad++, the normal notepad screwed everything up because it didn't put every message entry on its own line, it just became one long string)

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Still no succes.
The text is right, the number of " is right, utf8 no BOM is used, everything is copied to /home/user (I haven't tried that before). No result. Maybe I will try it later with less sms's

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Hi there!

Brand new N900 owner here!

Just spend hours typing over the messages from my previous phone (Click the link and you will realize why I had to type them, btw, that was the 2nd phone I ever owned, see my first phone. Tbh: N900 was the first smartphone that really spiked my attention, yay!)

I did an export first (I had some messages already on the N900), with the binary from the first post. And then added my old messages (in the correct order). Then I deleted all conversations and imported the csv file with my old and new messages, using the binaries from post #104.

Using | as delimiter and a proper editor (Vim), this was a hassle free experience. Except of course for the hours of typing because my old phone only showed 10 words on 1 screen and I had to go up and down to read the rest of the text, the phone number and the timestamp...

It also helps massively if you have previous Linux/Unix experience, I can see why other people on this thread get confused or frustrated with the process. If any of you still have questions: shoot and I'll try to answer them!

Hopla

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

ok I've done every single thing - NO FLAWS / ERROR MESSAGES........... but none of the messages were in the Conversation area.

any ideas on what could possible have gone wrong?

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

I have no idea man :s Without any error messages or any other clue, it gets really hard to guess :s

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Thanks! Your description made me get it to work! Thanks to all developers and bug reporters!

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Hi All Dear Friends

I do Import SMS from N97 To N900 Successfully , And I See all SMS in Conversation , but when i read old sms , closed conversation windows and show "Internal Error application "Conversation" closed"

did you tell me why show me this error

Best REGARDS:eek:

Re: HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900
 

Ok adding my story. I just imported it for the first time and all seems well (backup works too).

I did all my steps on linux except using PC Suite to extract the SMS from my 5800XM.

To edit the files I used the kate editor. It doesn't mess with the utf-8 encoding (I have lots of sms that use complex chars), and it has highlight on find, making some things a lot easier.

So, steps I followed:

• First I corrected the csv files to use | as a separator, after checking that none of the sms I had before used that character.
• Then I corrected instances where " was used inside messages, and nokia pc suite escapes it as "", I just replaced it with ' .
• Then I made a little program that chronologically merged my Inbox and Sent. (see below)
• Then I inverted the output of my app so that the sms were sorted from oldest to newest. (see below)
• Finally, I imported with smsimporter from post #104.

The invert and merge I am not fully sure that they are needed, but from reading the discussions it seemed that the insertion order is being used and not the original dates, so I based myself on that assumption.

Ok so now for the meaty part. My little app is attached (source and binary for x86). You use it like this:
If you want to merge multiple csv's, run it multiple times with the output from previous rounds.

To invert the file I used:
P.s.: Note that my app assumes | as a divider, but it should complain if something's amiss.