Moving from Evolution to Thunderbird

[asharpham]

I want to change over to Thunderbird for email handling and have several hundred emails I want to keep. These are in Evolution so I want to export them to Thunderbird.

I checked the instructions on page:
https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/switching-thunderbird?s=import+messages+from+evolution&as=s# w_importing-evolution-messages
and tried to follow the steps.

Getting to the folders wasn't too hard but I don't quite understand the instruction that tells me to copy the files (folders I presume) "into the emplacement used by Thunderbird". What do they mean by "emplacement"?

Do empty folders with equivalent names need to exist in Thunderbird first?

In Thunderbird, all the emails have gone into a folder named "cur" and are not displayed correctly.

I'd appreciate some guidance as I'm obviously doing something wrong.

Alan.

[phaed]

It looks like that guide was written by a non-native English speaker. By "emplacement" I think they just mean "place".

Basically, copy the files without extensions (Inbox, Outbox) from

~/.local/share/evolution/mail/local

to

~/.thunderbird/<profile name>/Mail/Local Folders

[asharpham]

In theory this should be easy. However, it's just not working. I copy the relevant folders (although Evolution doesn't contain an Inbox folder - Weird as there is definitely an Inbox when I open Evolution), and paste them into Thunderbird but the mail contained in them just doesn't show up. The folders don't seem to create where I expect them to be.

Also, the folders in Thunderbird have 3 sub folders: "cur", "new" and "tmp". Where do these fit in? They're not mentioned in the instructions.

Alan.

[asharpham]

I've started using Thunderbird despite the fact that I can't import the mail from evolution. However, there are dozens of files in the "cur" folder in Thunderbird with odd names like "1318684170.2046_4.alan-dell:2,S". I suspect these are the mail from Evolution but the files don't display.

Is there some way of displaying these files?

Alan.

[Zill]

asharpham: You haven't said which version of Evolution you are using but if it is v3.2.0 or later then the link you have provided is not appropriate. The later versions of Evolution use the maildir format, as opposed to the mbox format used by earlier versions of Evolution.

See the Evolution section of Importing and exporting your mail for specific information on how to import maildir format files.

[asharpham]

Unfortunately none of the answers have helped me open these files and the insructions on pages suggested by Zill haven't helped either. Any other suggestions? By the way, the version of Evolution I was using is 3.2.3 .

Alan

[asharpham]

Bump!

[Zill]

Unfortunately none of the answers have helped me open these files and the insructions on pages suggested by Zill haven't helped either. Any other suggestions? By the way, the version of Evolution I was using is 3.2.3 .

Please don't "bump" a thread immediately! It is standard practice to wait at least 24 hours before bumping a thread. As it is over a month since your last post in this thread I fail to see the urgency!

When you say the instructions I provided haven't helped can you please be more specific.

Evolution 3.2.0 and later uses maildir files. If you created your Evolution profile using a version that defaulted to maildir you will need to use a tool to convert maildir files into mbox files for multiple folders, such as maildirarc or maildir2mbox. Then you can import the mbox files using the ImportExportTools add-on, and resume using the article for how to import your other data.

Did you use maildirrc or maildir2mbox to convert your maildir files to mbox format?

Did you install the ImportExportTools into Thunderbird?

Please advise more details of what, exactly, you did and how it failed, with error messages if appropriate.

[cforput]

I'm trying to use maildir2mbox but when I run it I get the following error:

The program 'maildir2mbox' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: sudo apt-get install qmail

I'm trying to convert evolution to thunderbird and don't use qmail. I am also executing this in terminal from the folder that contains the file. Lastly, I checked the permissions and the flag to Allow executing file as a program is checked.

Any ideas?

[Zill]

...The program 'maildir2mbox' is currently not installed...

Caveat: I use an earlier version of Evolution that uses mbox files and so unfortunately I don't have any maildir files to test this with.

Looking at "maildir2mbox" from https://github.com/jooooooon/maildir2mbox this seems to contain two scripts and a README file, rather than a program. When you download and unzip this file the README states:

Usage
=====

cd /path/to/your/source/maildir
maildir2mbox > /path/to/your/destination.mbox

Note: you must make sure that the path to the accompanying script "dateRfc3339ToMbox.pl" is correct in the maildir2mbox script.

Looking at the maildir2mbox script, it seems to me that you should edit line 42 to change the path to the location you have unzipped file "dateRfc3339ToMbox.pl" to. e.g.

DATE=$(/root/scripts/dateRfc3339ToMbox.pl "$DATE")

edit to show

DATE=$(my path to/dateRfc3339ToMbox.pl "$DATE")

HTH.