I followed the process included here to get the PST file information into TBird. This was where I got stuck. I could not get Evolution to easily import the TBird email using the Import functionality. On a hunch, I tried moving the TBird email through the file system. Assuming my PST folders were named Foo and Bar, I went to the folder /home//.mozilla-thunderbird/7yz8272m.default/Mail/Local Folders/Outlook Mail.sbd. Inside here were two folders:
-Foo.sbd and
-Bar.sbd.

Additionally, there was a plain text file for each of these folders:
-Foo and
-Bar

and a . msf file for each folder:
-Foo.msf and
-Bar.msf.

I copied these to: /home//.evolution/mail/local (two folders and four files).

The next time I opened Evolution, th folders Foo and Bar were in the list, under “On This Computer,” just below Inbox. The only down side I’ve found thus far is that all the mail is marked as unread.

Now, anyone have suggestions for getting contacts out of TBird and into Evolution?

Thanks to all who wrote and commented on this topic. The information was invaluable in getting my email off the death star that is Windoze.

Allan

Only limitation worth noting with the software used for migrating, however, is that using non-ASCII standard text such as accented letters or otherwise in your Outlook will cause some unexpected behaviour when importing Contacts, Tasks and Calendar into Evolution (I have appointments, tasks and contacts which have English, French, Spanish, Chinese and Russian).

Contacts are troublesome, but you only have to replace all the affected text.

Calendar completely crashed Evolution and I had to delete the actual calendar files from ~/.evolution/calendar/local/system

Tasks were the strangest, though. Besides text not displaying correctly (I got this on all three, but it’s the same issue, I guess), Evolution would crash. But only when the cursor passed over the “strange” tasks. I assume this triggers the event that causes the crash.

Since I had a limited amount of tasks with these problems, I was able to delete them and just type them back in, but this is not really the case for my contacts and calendar. I have plenty of addresses in Cyrillic or Mandarin I’d like to keep and are not too keen on retyping.

If you’re interested, will let you know if I figure out another way around this.

– All the best,
Nick.

Very usefull article!

In short: my question
After you have used evolution now for some months, did you change to another mail client, or even change back to windows outlook? Or did you stick with evolution?

some background information and a story about microsoft licenses:

I also consider to migrate from windows to ubuntu.
I’ll already use ubuntu for creating meeting minutes on an acer onenote.
I”l synchronise these files with a tool ‘beyond compare’ (shareware 30$ – but very fast, stable and usefull).

The reason I still used Windows was Outlook, having also a mailing archive since 1998 organised in a pst file per year, and a hierarchy of mail folders, tasks and calender events (I don’t use notes)

The main reason I decided to migrate now also my outlook to the ubuntu environment is the fact that microsoft has found a new way to irritate users. Since a couple of weeks, the automatic update mechanism (wich works great, although you don’t know what it is doing with your system) has installed a feature to check for illegal software.
I have no problem checkking my computer because everything I install is legal (I tought)…
After checking, the system now always prompts me with a message that all my licenses of microsoft software are illegal.

What happened? Last year I bought a new computer, with an OEM version of VISTA installed on it. After reading the legal stuff before installing the license, I had a choice between : don’t install the OEM licence and ask for a refund in the store where I bought te computer (a lot of work and time for only a couple of $$), or install the software and use the prepaid license. I decided to use the prepaid licence.
I have a subscription to all the microsoft software as a MSDN developer.
Now it seems that the combination between the OEM Vista version and the licences from my MSDN package is illegal, so I can coose to reinstall the vista version from my developper kit (and then reinstall al the other software again), by all the licenses I use again (double cost) or make a move to ubuntu (including the mail client).
So I am a little bit angry to Microsoft, because I paid twice for the OS to conclude that by doing that I have illegal software on my comuter… and a lot of extra work or cost.

I like the OS environment of ubuntu and the possibilities of installing new software packages.

So I want you to ask, after you have used evolution now for some months, if you still stick with it or did you change to another mail client, or even change back to windows outlook? I’ll appriciate your feedback as I want to use it as an argument to my decision I’ll have to take right now.

Sincerly,
Dirk

very interesting article. Since about 2 months I forced myself into a similar action. Mainly to get rid of the painful experience with Vista, but also to see if I could survive in a business environment (mainly MS-focused) using Ubuntu. In my case I used the 8.10 which improved over 8.04 on network config (especially for wlan and umts) and config for multiple monitors.

Apart from some small annoyances (like no support for Windows DFS) I must say I’ll stick with Ubuntu as it is a pleasant, stable and very fast OS to work with.

I agree with your article for me the only reason to go back to Windows is because of Visio and mainly Outlook. I often review visio files and haven’t found a way to deal with them in Ubuntu. But the main annoyance in Linux is Evolution. I’m using it in combination with our exchange 2003 farm and like you I have loads of emails to manage and to archive. Last time I looked my mailbox was about 4 Gb in space, which never caused any problem with Outlook, but it does with Evolution.

A few times a day I have to force-shutdown Evolution because it stop responding or it looses connection with the backend of exchange. I heard that Apple is planning to use true MAPI connection in the mailclient of their next OS x release. I truly hope that someone develops a plugin or addon that does the same thing for Evolution as I believe this is where the problem is… To my knowledge Evolution uses the dll’s that are used in the OWA environment of exchange. I’m 100% sure that people are willing to pay for a decent mailclient that can be used in combination with Exchange. I know I am…

best regards,
Tim

Bene – Webdesign

Yes, I tried migrating all my Outlook mail using Thunderbird. The method I used was the same as the one you used, apart from the last of the 3 steps, where I instead moved the tbird mbox files into evolution’s local mail directory (which I think is ~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox.sbd/ ) as this saved doing the one-by-one file import for each mbox file / outlook folder. After doing this I noticed that some mail that was not brought over, and I first noticed that mail was missing in several non-spam folders (which I knew for sure contained mail in Outlook, although only a few items), but used the spam email folder as the example because it’s a good way of illustrating the problem using large numbers. Also the problem was with Thunderbird, not with evolution (i.e. the folders with missing mail were missing in both Tbird & evolution, and 99% of the spam mail was missing in both tbird & evolution – i.e. the import from tbird to evolution seemed to work okay, but the mail was lost going from outlook to Thunderbird). I’m not sure of the cause of the mail being lost – could be folder hierarchy, or some other reason, I honestly don’t know.

– All the best,
Nick.

Did you try moving any other email besides you junk with the Thunderbird method? The reason I ask is that I used this method and successfully migrated 20,000 emails without any loss. I suspect that Evolution treats junk mail differently and may have been deleting most of it upon import (perhaps there’s a rule to delete junk over a certain age?). I also have a simpler email hierarchy than you so that may be part of the problem as well.

This is how I did it:
- I installed Thunderbird on my Windows partition and had it import email from Outlook.
- I located Thunderbird’s mbox files stored in my account Application Data folder which was something like C:/Documents and Setting/My account/ Application Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/random letters/Mail/. From there my pst’s each had their own folder containing all original subfolders
- I rebooted into my linux partition and opened Evolution, selected Import file from the File menu, and was able to point it at the mbox files on my window’s partition and import them one by one without a loss

The web site with the closest method to what I wound up using is http://www.softwareinreview.com/migration_guides/moving_email_from_windows_to_linux.html

Now I just need to figure out how to get Evolution to retain the color coding for my calendar.

Regards,
Christian

Thanks for the detailed article. I got to know what are my options with Linux. I am on Fedora Core 9 and Evolution is the last thing I need to configure to go totally with Linux. I also intend to use evolution and if I am not able to configure or use it, would go with Thunderbird.

Destination Infinity

Well I’ll give Evolution a go – I’m kind of used to the idea of one big app that does all your mail/notes/tasks/calendar/contacts, but maybe it’s not a good model. I’m thinking I’ll try it for a few weeks, and then see how I feel. I may just give up and go back to Windows, or may try another graphical mail client on Linux (that’s two comments in favor of Thunderbird, so it looks like that’s the one that I should try first). Thankfully once you’ve got your data into one open source mail client, it _looks_ like it should be easier to move it around between them – hopefully that’s the case in practice! So, will try Evo for a while, and then try Thunderbird if it’s not to my liking.

Oh, and Wifi on Linux laptops may still sort of suck – I remember having all sorts of problems moving between rooms at conferences, and the wifi would sometimes stop working if you tried to switch from one access point to another, and the solution was to reboot … that may or may not be fixed now though.

– All the best,
Nick.