Eudora vs. Mail Reprise (fails to import)

[Anne Keller-Smith]

I spoke with Apple today, and they offer no quick answers to the failure
of Mail in Jaguar to import my Eudora mailboxes. She suggested either
the format in Eudora is too old, or that I have too much mail to import.
(One of the boxes does indeed contain 8000 messages - it only
imported about 700 of these; another box that should contain
500+ messages only imported 44)

Wondering whether I should change my mind again and buy an
update for Eudora Pro. Several respondents here previously
suggested if I did this I would be happier than if I used Mail.

Why not throw out all that mail? Well, some of it is Client mail
that I like to keep for legal purposes, discussions about work
we did. Another part is correspondence with friends about my
husband's illness.

Another option would be to save the Eudora mail as text
files. Doing this one by one would be too time consuming -
is there any way to convert all email to text files in one
fell swoop?

A third option is to let Eudora Pro 3.1 archive the old mail
and to proceed with Apple Mail for the new stuff. The wrinkle
here is ensuring that in three years from now I can still
access that old version of Eudora on some computer.

TIA,