Re: [Evolution] Importing from Thunderbird on WinXP

[guenther <guenther rudersport de>]

On Sat, 2006-01-14 at 10:43 +0000, Gordon Burgess-Parker wrote:
> On Saturday 14 January 2006 02:36, Michael Abbott wrote:

> > I'm running Evolution on a standard install of Ubuntu Linux.  I want to
> > be able to import all my Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail across from another
> > WinXP partition.  What's the easiest / safest way to do this?
>
> Just copy the "Local Folders" directory from your TBird Profile and paste it 
> directly into your /home/.evolution/mail/local/ folder. It's as easy as that.

Basically, this should work. :-)

Since you do have mails in Evo you do not want to overwrite, I'd suggest
this:

Have a look at your ~/.evolution/mail/local/ directory. For example the
"Inbox" named file is the file actually containing your mails. All those
Inbox.* [1] files are Evo indexing or meta files. Thunderbird got some
similar but differently named (IIRC) files of its own. You don't need to
copy those.

Sub-directories are directories with the extension ".sbd". Keep this in
mind when copying your folders recursively.

To copy over your Thunderbird mail without harming your current Evo
mail, you simply can create a dir to import (aka copy) into, like:

  ~/.evolution/mail/local/import-from-thunderbird.sbd

When done, just start Evo again. It may take a while to re-index all
your just imported mail, depending on the amount.

Note: All the above applies from memory, only. ;)  IIRC Mozilla /
Thunderbird and Evolution do use the same layout WRT to mbox format
files containing your mail and sub-directories at least.

...guenther


[1] $ ls Inbox.*
    Inbox.cmeta  Inbox.ev-summary  Inbox.ibex.index  Inbox.ibex.index.data


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