After making the plunge to Linux earlier this year, I also decided (for good or ill) to migrate to Ximian (later Novell) Evolution, the integrated Outlook clone that is now even more tightly bound to GNOME. With Fedora Core 3, I even got an upgrade to the latest 2.0 branch.
Unfortunately, the results were not too spectacular. Common features such as saving images in emails were absent. (I even filed a bug report on the issue!) Evolution wouldn't play nice with email servers that were being accessed by multiple clients simultaneously, causing me untold grief when I would forget to close my email client at work! Add random crashes to the mix (I even wrote a little script to kill all the miscellaneous Evolution processes) and that was enough for me to dump it.
Hello, Thunderbird! Being a big fan of the Mozilla suite, it's nice to be working with the latest standalone client. (I also use it at work.) Migrating from Evolution to Thunderbird wasn't the easiest, but I succeeded. Here's how:
Mail messages: Evolution and Thunderbird both save their local mail in a common format; a simple copy operation is then all that is neded. (They're located in ~/.evolution/local/*; look for files without file extensions.) Copy them to your new Thunderbird profile, at ~.thunderbird/*random dir name*/Mail/Local Folders, and restart Thunderbird. They're all there, albeit unread. A small price to pay, and easily remedied with a click of the mouse. :)
The address book is somewhat more tricky, since there's no common format that Evolution and Thunderbird share between the numerous export/import filters available. Here's how I got my Evolution Contacts ported over into the Thunderbird Address book. First, export all the Contacts by selecting all of them within Evolution with CTRL+A and a right-click popup menu option 'Save as VCard...' Then, with the help of a little perl script, the exported VCF file can be turned into an LDIF file that Thunderbird can then import.
Nifty, huh?
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