Importing big mail hierarchy into Evolution - how?

[Chris G]

On Sun, Feb 01, 2009 at 07:29:53PM +0000, Chris G wrote:
> I am moving my wife over to xubuntu from windows XP, the move has been
> precipitated by the disk drive on her XP system dying.  Fortunately I
> was able to extract all the data before it expired completely - but
> that's another story.
> 
> She was using Thunderbird and Firefox on XP so the initial transition
> to Linux has been fairly painless.  I have got all of her Thunderbird
> mail on the Linux system now.
> 
> However it would be better if I could move her to Evolution because
> that synchronizes "out of the box" with her Palm Treo - I have the
> synchronization working already.
> 
> The trouble is I need to get all of her mail across from Thunderbird
> to Evolution.  It's easy enough copying individual mailboxes across
> but she has an extensive, hierarchical, mail archive with hundreds of
> messages in a complex hierarchy of fifty or sixty folders.  It would
> take forever to copy this folder by folder.
> 
> So, can anyone suggest a way to export the folders from Thunderbird
> and import them into Evolution preserving the structure?  I have found
> the ImportExportTools add-on for Thunderbird but Evolution doesn't
> seem to understand the format of what it exports.
> 
Tha answer turns out to be trivial, you can just copy the mailbox
files and folders from their Thunderbird location to the right
location in Evolution and it works.  This is because both programs use
similar mbox files and the convention <name>.sdb for folders.  When
you open folders copied like this in Evolution it re-indexes them and
is then quite happy.

-- 
Chris Green