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There’s got to be an easier way
Posted by BostonPeng on 11 June 2008
After reading Sense Hofstede’s post about moving from Thunderbird to Evolution and finally being able to sync all the info to his PDA I decided it was time to look into making the switch myself. Mainly because it’s a pain in the arse having to deal with so bloody many calendar sources (Google, Thunderbird/Lightning and J-Pilot). He includes a link to a How-To on importing Thunderbird mail into Evolution, and while its working it’s an incredibly tedious process. I’ve got over 100 folders of email that have to be imported (plus more folders from my Thunderbird 2 profile that didn’t seem to carry over quite properly into Thunderbird 3) and I’m not even 20% of the way after working on it for over an hour.
If someone knows of an easier way to do this please let me know. Something tells me that when I log off and head home in a few hours I’ll have more to do tomorrow.
Nico said
The best way is to install a local IMAP server, like dovecot-imap. There is a very minimal setup to do for it, all documented in /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf.
Setup both your email clients to use it, as an additional account.
Drag&Drop…
Works to convert all email from /to any email client with IMAP support, keeping status (replied, forwarded, read, etc…).
When done, purge dovecot.
Nico said
the package’s name is dovecot-imapd
Fabian Rodriguez said
I’ve used IMAP many times succesfully to move email around.
The next question is why would you use Evolution at all..? Not being ironic, I am really interested in knowing why TB doesn’t fit the bill.
Peng said
The main reason is because I’m sick of having to maintain extra calendars between my PDA and Google. Just adding a new doctor’s appointment takes extra steps because the PDA can’t use Thunderbird’s calendar. With as full as my plate can be some days I’d really like to be able to use one calendar and know it’s available to me no matter what program I’m using to check it.
There had been a program to sync the Palm calendar to Thunderbird but it’s Windows only so it’s completely useless to me, even if it worked with the Thunderbird I use, which I don’t think is the case ever since Thunderbird 2 was released. I may be wrong, but it’s a non-issue since I dumped Windows 19 months ago.