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.

I’ll give Evolution a go for a week or two - the Ubuntu folks seem to be pushing it as the default choice, and there’s a lot benefit to running what everyone else is running, in terms of support and fixes and updates.

I will have a look at Thunderbird on Linux though if Evolution doesn’t work out. I had a look at Kontact / Kmail, and was leaning towards it as my choice because I really liked the look of kmail, it had some annoying issues that turned me off of it:
1) kontact: Only one set of tasks, when I have a nested hierarchy.
2) kontact: Only one set of memos.
3) Kmail: If you reply to an HTML email, it converts it all to plain text, and you cannot turn this off. [http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86423 bug report], and [http://www.computerbob.com/guides/why_i_wont_use_kmail_or_kontact.php someone else's whinge about this].

– All the best,
Nick.

Another thing that used to suck and may still suck: laptop wifi.

Did you consider Thunderbird, or did you want to keep using all those things (notes, tasks etc) in the same application?

BUT, after the 2.0 version of Thunderbird, with assuming the fact that TB has add-ons, TB became my first choice. It is robust like Evolution now; but it has much more features.

Tip: Try to analyze KMail features for importing email. KMail is the richest free software email client. Unfortunately, it was never stable. However, it is very useful as a transitional method for moving to Evolution or TB.

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At least dutch/german/afrikaans all have consistent translations between pronunciation and spelling - “w” is always pronounced as we’d (usually) pronounce “v”, etc. Just look at the “ough” mess in english, or the wikipedia entry for “ghoti” to see how terrible english is..

@ Daniel: Nick has been very generous to provide you a patience-filled response but I do feel what you said was not something that really made sense. I’ve taught data structures at a university but still I’d like to have a look at the bubble sort algo once to recollect if i am 100% accurate.

We in the real world care more about the jobs that we have to get done: the real world problems, and not the stories about what Dijkstra said in 1870s.

@ leonid: I think you’ve just been unlucky OR your country doesn’t have too many developers (which I doubt to be a fact). PHP is a simple language. Here, ’simple’ means easy enough for those with 0 years of experience as well as 10 years of experience. I’m also of the opinion that PHP is just a tool, look for a guy who knows the Internet and web based stuff (even on jsp/aspx) and he should be good for you as he’lll surely be able to pick up PHP in a week at max I’d say.