Evolution out, Thunderbird in (or how to migrate the quickly from Evolution to something else)


NOTE: This doesn't work!  It's missing all my recent saved mail.  evolution saves the newer stuff in individual files with a ",S" suffix in a different directory.  Ugh.  I have Evolution.

My fedora 19 upgrade at work has gone badly.  I've reinstalled twice, back peddled to F18 (which didn't work at all) and tried switching to CentOS (which failed trying to read my Evolution folders).  Right now I'm on F19 and the xfce desktop is still fairly slow, though better than my first tries (multiple kernel and x.org updates since then).  But Evolution is completely unusable.  It's painfully slow to do anything, from switching accounts to just browsing a single accounts email.  I've tried a number of things I found online but none seemed to have any impact.  I've tried messing with hdparm in case that was a culprit.  Nothing helps.  Evolution in F19 is too slow to be usable.  So I've switched to thunderbird.

The trick to switching is understanding that Evolution keeps mail in mbox folders along with associated indexing files.  You can ignore the indexing files and just copy over the mboxes to Thunderbirds Local Folders directory manually.  When you start Thunderbird it will see the new mboxes and you're all set though you still have to set up your imap/pop3 accounts – I didn't try to do that outside of thunderbird.  I also didn't worry about contact lists or calendars because the former I can recreate as I go and the latter I don't really care about.

To make it easier for anyone who hasn't tried this, here are the steps I took, including making a backup of the Evolution folders before doing any of this.  Much of the process for doing this was already online, except for the part of collecting just the mboxes from Evolution.  Let's look at that process first.

  1. mkdir ~/backups/evolution
  2. cd ~/.local/share/evolution/mail
  3. rsync -a local_mbox ~/backups/evolution
  4. cd ~/backups/evolution
  5. find local_mbox -type f -iname "*.cmeta" | egrep -v "Junk|Trash" | sed 's/.cmeta//' > filelist.txt
  6. mkdir mbox
  7. tar -T filelist.txt -cvf - | (cd mbox; tar xvf -)

Now you have a collection of mboxes, in their original folder structure, that you can import into another mail reader.  To get them into either Thunderbird or SeaMonkey:

  1. In Thunderbird, right click on Local Folders, select Settings.
  2. Note Local directory path
  3. Open a file browser and navigate to that directory.
  4. Open second file browser and navigate to ~/backups/evolution/mbox/local_mbox
  5. Select all files/directories in second file browser.
  6. Choose Edit->Copy
  7. In first file browser choose Edit->Paste to copy all files and folders to Thunderbird/SeaMonkey

All your old email is now available under Local Folders in Thunderbird or SeaMonkey.  To do the same with Claws-Mail:

  1. Create folders under mbox (which may or may not be available – I'm not sure if I created that accidentally or not)
  2. Import mbox into folders one at a time.

It's harder with Claws-Mail because there is no default Local Folders under which you can just copy the mboxes.  At least I couldn't find one.

When you're done, you'll want to delete the backup as it won't be required anymore.  But hang onto your original evolution folders (~/.local/share/evolution) in case you need to refer to it again later.

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