HOWTO: Importing SMS messages from Nokia phones to N900 - Page 14 - maemo.org

theswiss | # 131 | 2010-02-11, 21:00 | Report

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! ;-)

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shamoni8 | # 132 | 2010-02-19, 11:52 | Report

Originally Posted by it_savy View Post

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

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

huggy54 | # 133 | 2010-03-13, 15:25 | Report

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

dandelo | # 134 | 2010-03-14, 17:14 | Report

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

breakthru | # 135 | 2010-03-16, 19:58 | Report

Originally Posted by theswiss View Post

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! ;-)

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

Last edited by breakthru; 2010-03-16 at 21:57.

breakthru | # 136 | 2010-03-17, 01:09 | Report

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...

iloveu | # 137 | 2010-03-23, 04:58 | Report

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!

Robb | # 138 | 2010-03-23, 08:48 | Report

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):

Code:

iconv --from-code=CP1252 --to-code=UTF-8 ./oldfile.csv > ./newfile.csv

This should be on one line.

To check if your national language characters converted to UTF-8 correctly, type:

Code:

cat ./newfile.csv

and review the output if national characters appear.

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iloveu | # 139 | 2010-03-25, 02:37 | Report

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.

iloveu | # 140 | 2010-03-28, 11:59 | Report

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