Simon Willison’s Weblog

I actually just installed Thunderbird. Looks like the old KMozilla Mail but it has some hidden tweaks and features that are really appealing. I'll have to check out the extensions. Aaron Brazell

Aaron Brazell - 19th June 2003 04:34 - #

Just curious: Have you tried KDE's KMail, and if so, why didn't you continue using it? Evolution didn't do it for me, so I moved to KMail and haven't looked back.

Not to start a mail-client debate, of course.

Adrian Holovaty - 19th June 2003 04:52 - #

Mmm. KMail. Highly personal opinions to follow ;) Against it everything else just pales (and I've tried every free mailer in existence, including command-line ones). Evolution barely got a look-in it was so annoying :) Can't wait for Trolltech to finish the porting of KDE to OSX so I can use KMail natively and ditch the apalling OSX Mailer.

richard - 19th June 2003 07:08 - #

I glanced very briefly at KMail but didn't really take it for a test drive - I'll have another look. My most valued feature in a mail client is its filter support and Evolution really came through on that one, with the ability to easily set up filters based on mailing list headers through the context menu and the handy VFilter thing for extra flexibility.

Simon Willison - 19th June 2003 16:58 - #

KMail has great filter support, including context-menu stuff such as "Filter on Subject...", "Filter on To...", etc.

Adrian Holovaty - 19th June 2003 18:18 - #

I've always used Outlook (mainly because of the syncing with my Pocket PC), but I use Firebird as my default browser. I thought I'd investigate Thunderbird for use on my laptop and what I thought was ...

Wow, this looks almost exactly like Netscape Communicator Mail version 4.nothing.

Some people might think this is no bad thing, but for me the reason to move across is not clear. Having a trawl through the menu items didn't reveal anything too enticing.

Am I missing something?

I think what's needed is a run-down of the features and why you should convert - just like they did with Firebird, 'cos right now I just ain't gettin it!

Ian Lloyd - 20th June 2003 08:56 - #

Of course, I should have used an inline quote <q> on that last post ... ho hum

Ian Lloyd - 20th June 2003 08:59 - #

Evolution at the time a few years ago was sweet, Kmail seems plain way to plain. Got into evolution. now that spam is crazy I was playing with mozilla mail then now to the latest thunderbird. I like it .. I like it alot. but Evolution has no way to convert ...Export out of this software. Its not that stable I find it crashes alot. I run it all day everyday in a business enviroment . I get 20-30 emails aday (not including spam) and I give it a workout. I find it crashes daily . This new client I am super impressed with (thunderbird) Now if I could get my hundreds and hundreds of email addresses out of this evolution I could rid myself of its bulky memory hogging crashing email client software. Features I wish it had where things like the MS windows increadamail has for bouncing emails. If I could bounce emails that would be the bomb,. Does anyone know of a evolution to some for of format that thunderbird can import features. frig makes you wounder. If the client does not want you to leave they make sure you can't.. feels so much and I hate to say it.. makes me fee like I am in MS outlook.. but hey least MS outlook has some form of export option that is compatible with othere things frig this is not right. evolution must be stopped. or at least updated to a featue that I can use to get out of it so I can be free.. LInux is free and flexable.. least with kmail you could convert with no issues since it has ways to export out.. the flexability and freedom is what makes linux so awesome

m - 10th February 2004 02:12 - #

I've been using Evolution and Thunderbird a lot and I can tell you that they use the same underlying mailbox structure (some UNIX standard mail format).

What that means is that you can manually move mailboxes between the two programs, as long as you have a matching folder structure.

eg. folder inbox in Evolution has a file called mbox (which is the mail store).

In Thunderbird, there is a similar file, this time called inbox.

The key point here is that in Evolution the file is always called mbox and the directory structure defines what the actual message box is, whereas in Thunderbird the file is always named after the message folder.

Simply copying one across to the other and changing the name makes its contents available - I know this works because I ported all my Evolution mail to Thunderbird. And that was between Linux Evolution and WINXP Thunderbird.

Now, you could be really clever and symbolically link the two files, so that whichever program you used was up to date. I've not tried this yet but I am about to.

Finally, it should be relatively easy to write a small script that ports the boxes between the mailers. With a bit of cleverness, it might even be able to generate the appropriate directory and subdirectory structures.

Robin Layfield - 14th June 2004 19:31 - #

I just wrote a ruby script that does the mail portion of converting evolution mboxes to thunderbird. I have only used it on linux. I am sure that it should work for unix also. I doubt that it will work on windows as is, but I believe that it can easily be adapted. There is one caveat. You need to get the find2 package from the ruby archives, I am just going to cut and paste the script which should work, as it is text. #!/bin/env ruby require "find2"; # This is the Thunderbird base directory tb = "#{ENV['HOME']}/.thunderbird" # Change directory to 'tb', to find the find the email folders Dir.chdir tb # Find the Inbox, because that is where the thunderbird folders are. tbdir = `qf 'Inbox$'`.chomp # Get rid of the Inbox because just the directory is wanted tbdir.sub!(%r{/Inbox$},"") # make the directory the full path. tbdir = "#{tb}/#{tbdir}" # This is where evolution keeps its mail files edir = "#{ENV['HOME']}/evolution/local" Dir.chdir(edir) # Find each evolution email folder and copy it to the thunderbird folder. Find2.find({'follow',1},'.') { |f| if f =~ /mbox$/ then # Get rid of the './' in front of the directory string. f.sub!(%r{^\./},"") # Add the appropriate backslashes for file names with spaces in them f.gsub!(/\s+/,"\\\\\\ ") # Get the name of the evolution folder so it can be used. f =~ %r{^(.*)/} # Do the copying. puts "cp #{edir}/#{f} #{tbdir}/#{$1}" end }

Rob Robertson - 29th June 2004 05:22 - #

To:friend welcome from the chain

Ken Lov - 8th September 2004 14:58 - #