Re: [Evolution] Importing email folders from Thunderbird

["Patrick M. Kelecy" <pkelecy insightbb com>]

On Wed, 2007-05-30 at 16:46 -0400, Peter N Spotts wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-05-30 at 16:27 -0400, Patrick M. Kelecy wrote:
> > I have several years worth of email saved in a nested folder structure
> > in Thunderbird 2.0.  Is there any easy way to import this into Evolution
> > 2.8.2?  Using Evolutions import feature I can only import one folder at
> > a time (AFAIK), which means I would have to first recreate the entire folder structure
> > in Evolution and them import the contents one folder at a time to do it that way.  That would be very
> > tedious and time consuming given the number of folders I have.  So I'm
> > hoping there's an easier solution.
> > 
> > Thanks for any help with this. -Pat
> > _______________________________________________
> > Evolution-list mailing list
> > Evolution-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list
> 
> Pat,
> 
> Since each mail-bearing folder really is a file, try copying your T-bird
> mail files into your /home/~/.evolution/mail/local directory with a file
> manager. Just the mail-bearing files, not the others. This assumes
> assuming there are no duplicate file names, that is -- you don't want to
> overwrite one mail file with another. Then restart Evolution. It should
> recognize the files and set up the appropriate additional files it needs
> to fully function. This takes a while for large numbers of email.
> Evolution may not recreate the nested structure you currently have. But
> you can do that my clicking and dragging one "folder" over another in
> the folder tree once they are all in Evolution.
> 
> Before you dump the T-bird files, make sure all your emails made it
> across by crosschecking the number of emails each client shows for each
> folder. 
> 
> This may sound a bit awkward, but it's the solution that has worked for
> me...
> 
> with best regards,
> 
> Pete

Thanks Pete!  That worked great and was very easy to do using Nautilus.

I now have a couple of other questions mainly related to cleaning up a
few things:

1.  These folders originally came from Outlook, and with some of them I
had added a special character "prefix" (either "@" or ":") to their name
so they would move to the top of a folder list in an alphabetical
sorting.  In Linux these characters don't appear to do anything.  Is
there any special character equivalent in the Linux world that would
have the same effect?

2.  After importing the folders, I did some rearranging and emptied a
few of the folders.  I would now like to delete these, but when I try to
Evolutions says it can't because they're not empty.  I guess there must
be some hidden files.  Is there anyway to force it to delete?  Command
line?

Thanks again for the help.

Pat