Re: [Evolution] No Matter What I Try, Can't Move Thunderbird Archives to Evo

[Ángel <angel 16bits net>]

On 2019-02-20 at 03:05 +0000, Bill and Carol Yager wrote:
> Tried Milan's suggestion about using the "Standard Unix mbox spool
> directory".  This did allow me to get my hierarchy of saved folders
> over to Evolution.  However, each folder and subfolder name now
> has .sbd added to it.  The name can't be modified and the error
> message says that the file doesn't exist. Also the folder can't be
> deleted because they are spool files.  I have now spent just too much
> time on this. Too bad, I liked Evolution, but it just doesn't handle
> the importing of saved email folders from other mail clients. Until
> that is available, the program is not usable for us.  Thanks for the
> help though.
>
>
> Bill

The problem is that in this format each folder with emails is stored as
a mbox file. And each folder that itself contains subfodler is stored as
a filesystem folder. Since you can't have both a file and a folder with
the same name, this doesn't allow you to store emails on non-leaf
folders.
Thunderbird works around this by adding a .sdb suffix to those
filesystem folders.
If you don't store mail on non-leaf folders, it's trivial to remove
those .sdb suffixes. Else, you will need to use a different store
format, like maildir. It's easy to convert from this to maildir, but
it's not as immediate, as there is an extra step.

Best regards