airjunman
July 7th, 2006, 05:32 AM
Now this is a real pain in the *****, was at least.. I didn't find any place that told it clearly, so just put together what worked for me.. OE and MS Outlook store their mailboxes as .dbx files, one file for each mail folder(eg.:Inbox.dbx,Sent.dbx,etc.). Generally the path for those files on the Windows box is C:/Documents and Settings/uid/Local Settings/Application Data/Identities/{1C46C658-5362-5463-8708-F215FD67238}/Microsoft/Outlook Express
where uid is your windows logon user id, and, the numbers are changed
On Linux you need to have KMail installed with a plugin called KMail CVT which lets you import OE mailboxes and convert them to the standard linux mbox files. Both can be got from the repositories by doing the following:
$ sudo apt-get install kmail
$ sudo apt-get install kmailcvt
You now need to import the necessary files:
Open KMail
File>Import Messages
This opens a dialog box which asks you to choose the program from which you want to import the mail
Click on the dropdown menu and choose "Import Outlook Express Emails"
Click "Next" and then choose the files
(You may have transferred the dbx to some place on your linux partition or else hopefully you'd have the drive containing it mounted so you can access it, in my case I just have my NTFS/Windows partitions mounted, which the latest Ubuntu does automatically.. Anyways you'd have to do one or the other) If it is mounted it could be at /media/hda6 which is to just give an example of how mine is. Also as an example the folder in Windows where the files generally are is: C:/Documents and Settings/uid/Local Settings/Application Data/Identities/{1C46C658-5362-5463-8708-F215FD67238}/Microsoft/Outlook Express
Once you've chosen the folder, KMail downloads the mailbox and organises the folder structure as
Local Folder > OE Import > "foldername"(say Inbox)
Now all you do is go to each folder. Select all the mails in it by <Ctrl+A> and then click on File>Save as
This opens a box to choose where to save the file, choose the path and the filename. You can name the file anything(say example.mbox), unlike what I earlier assumed that you'd have to name it *.mbox, you can leave it without any extension.
Anyways you're done. If you want to use KMail as your mail client that is. I dont like it much, I prefer Opera Mail cos it has everything you want and not much more and the important functions have easy shortcuts. So, like me, if you use another mail client, you have one step more.
Open any program you want: Evolution or Opera Mail or Thunderbird or anything else that you use. Choose to import files of "generic mbox type" and choose the file you saved earlier(in our case example.mbox). You're good to go.
Let me know if I made any mistake cos I'm only a newbie anyways. Just trying to give back a lill. Hope it works n helps someone out there trying to make the transition from Windows to Linux/Ubuntu
where uid is your windows logon user id, and, the numbers are changed
On Linux you need to have KMail installed with a plugin called KMail CVT which lets you import OE mailboxes and convert them to the standard linux mbox files. Both can be got from the repositories by doing the following:
$ sudo apt-get install kmail
$ sudo apt-get install kmailcvt
You now need to import the necessary files:
Open KMail
File>Import Messages
This opens a dialog box which asks you to choose the program from which you want to import the mail
Click on the dropdown menu and choose "Import Outlook Express Emails"
Click "Next" and then choose the files
(You may have transferred the dbx to some place on your linux partition or else hopefully you'd have the drive containing it mounted so you can access it, in my case I just have my NTFS/Windows partitions mounted, which the latest Ubuntu does automatically.. Anyways you'd have to do one or the other) If it is mounted it could be at /media/hda6 which is to just give an example of how mine is. Also as an example the folder in Windows where the files generally are is: C:/Documents and Settings/uid/Local Settings/Application Data/Identities/{1C46C658-5362-5463-8708-F215FD67238}/Microsoft/Outlook Express
Once you've chosen the folder, KMail downloads the mailbox and organises the folder structure as
Local Folder > OE Import > "foldername"(say Inbox)
Now all you do is go to each folder. Select all the mails in it by <Ctrl+A> and then click on File>Save as
This opens a box to choose where to save the file, choose the path and the filename. You can name the file anything(say example.mbox), unlike what I earlier assumed that you'd have to name it *.mbox, you can leave it without any extension.
Anyways you're done. If you want to use KMail as your mail client that is. I dont like it much, I prefer Opera Mail cos it has everything you want and not much more and the important functions have easy shortcuts. So, like me, if you use another mail client, you have one step more.
Open any program you want: Evolution or Opera Mail or Thunderbird or anything else that you use. Choose to import files of "generic mbox type" and choose the file you saved earlier(in our case example.mbox). You're good to go.
Let me know if I made any mistake cos I'm only a newbie anyways. Just trying to give back a lill. Hope it works n helps someone out there trying to make the transition from Windows to Linux/Ubuntu