I installed Thunderbird and found myself faced with the problem of importing mail from Evolution 2.0.4. A search for “import email and address book from evolution to thunderbird” on the Chinese sellout Google turned up more people with the same problem than solutions, and the solutions were either outdated or wrong.

One refers to copying an mbox file to the Thunderbird Local Folders folder and even offers commands you can cut and paste. But they don’t work because there is no file or folder under .evolution called mbox. Rather it’s a type of file. You can find it here. Another method tells you to highlight all your mail and save it as a mbox file with the extension .mbx. It is here, but it doesn’t tell you what to do with it.

For email, I downloaded the script (bottom of page) from Todd Warner to export addresses and all I got was a txt file with names and nicknames; no street or email addresses in it.

Another script I found to export address books called evol2tbird wouldn’t run.

The Mozilla wiki pulls a vacuum. They start off by telling you how easy it’s going to be; now there’s a tell right there.

There is a recent Mozillazine forum the crux of which is a bunch of shrugged shoulders and references to the above links. I have not checked other forums.

Here is a method that worked for me on the emails:

1. Install Thunderbird. You can set up accounts if you want but you might want to work offline until your done here so you don’t loose anything. If Thunderbird is open close it.
2. What follows can all be done from Konqueror or Nautilus windows. Open 2 of them and turn on hidden files. In one go to .thunderbird/xxxxxxxxx.default/mail/Local Folder. In the other navigate to .evolution/mail/local.
3. In your Evolution window depending on the complexity of your Evolution email folder tree you will see some folders ending in .sbd. Also, you will see some files without any extension. They will be: inbox, draft, trash or sent etc. In my tree they are the only ones without extensions and correspond to the top level folders in Evolution. Highlight all of these and copy (not move) them to the Thunderbird window overwriting any that are there. Don’t worry about anything. If you don’t like the results you can simply delete the whole “Local Folders” folder, open Thunderbird, and, on opening, Thunderbird will recreate the folder in all its original glory. Otherwise, open Thunderbird and close it again. Refresh your Thunderbird window, and you will see a .sbd folder created for each of the files you copied there. Go into each of the .sbd folders in the Evolution window, and, where they exist, repeat this process copying the extensionless files into the corresponding .sbd folder in your Thunderbird window. When you’re done open Thunderbird and all your email will be there. At least that was my experience.

You can output your address book from Evolution into a VCard format. Problem is Thunderbird can’t read it. Below is how I bridged that gap using Kmail.

1. In Evolution click the Contacts button such that all your address information is showing in the space where emails are usually listed. Single click on the first contact as if you are going to open it for edit. Go to the last contact and shift click on it to highlight them all.
2. I believe you can choose file, save as, and the default type is vcard. Or, you can right click on the hightlighted contacts and do the same; I can’t remember precisely. Anyway, If you are using KDE you can import the vcard file into Kmail. Kmail will import a whole host of formats and export to the same.
3. Export them to a .csv file.