Monday, July 03, 2006

Evolution to Thunderbird: Migrating

Well, that wasn't hard, really. I just followed these instructions, which basically say that you copy files from the ~/.evolution directory into the ~/.mozilla-thunderbird directory. Note that Evolution no longer calls all its mailboxes "mbox", the Inbox is called Inbox, and its subfolders are located in the directory Inbox.sbd. I basically did a mass copy and deleted all of the summary and index files.

As for the address book, well, it's a mess. Evolution only exports to something called vcard. Well, not quite true, it tries to export to CSV (comma separated values), but it doesn't do well. Thunderbird will import CSV's, but doesn't get everything correct. There are various attempts on the web to fix this, but they're all cumbersome. So what I've done is export Evolution's email to VCARDs, which I can read, and I'll rebuild the Thunderbird's address book by hand. Not the optimal way to do things, but that's the way we'll go.

One more thing: you'll want to install the Thunderbird Signature Switch Extension.

Now to change all my "mail" references in various menus from evolution to mozilla-thunderbird.

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