On Mon, Feb 02, 2009 at 04:19:04PM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:
On 02 Feb 10:10, Chris G wrote:
I am moving my wife over to xubuntu from windows XP, the move has been precipitated by the disk drive on her XP system dying. Fortunately I was able to extract all the data before it expired completely - but that's another story. (I'll post about that in a minute)
She was using Thunderbird and Firefox on XP so the initial transition to Linux has been fairly painless. I have got all of her Thunderbird mail on the Linux system now.
However it would be better if I could move her to Evolution because that synchronizes "out of the box" with her Palm Treo - I have the synchronization working already.
The trouble is I need to get all of her mail across from Thunderbird to Evolution. It's easy enough copying individual mailboxes across but she has an extensive, hierarchical, mail archive with hundreds of messages in a complex hierarchy of fifty or sixty folders. It would take forever to copy this folder by folder.
So, can anyone suggest a way to export the folders from Thunderbird and import them into Evolution preserving the structure? I have found the ImportExportTools add-on for Thunderbird but Evolution doesn't seem to understand the format of what it exports.
The usual solution is "IMAP server".
Though, quite why the mail wasn't already just stored on the IMAP server is beyond me... people these days!
We *do* use an IMAP server but, being somewhat paranoid and also sometimes needing to see mail when the ADSL or something dies it's a good idea to keep archives at least on the local system. Not to mention that an IMAP server with >2Gb of E-Mail tends to get a bit slow at times.
(Weirdly, even though I'm using mutt, and my mail is stored on the same box as I'm composing this, I read my mail via imap - it's slightly quicker for some situations, and lots quicker when I have large maildirs).
Personally I use mutt too but it's not for everyone. My mutt runs on a remote system (I have ssh access to my hosting provider) so I can access it from anywhere using ssh - from my Nokia E71 if need be.