Migrate Outlook into Thunderbird?

[Bo Berglund]

On Mon, 10 Jul 2023 11:34:36 -0500, Keith <keithw at caramail.com> wrote:

>On 7/10/23 2:12 AM, Bo Berglund wrote:
>> On Mon, 10 Jul 2023 03:01:38 +0800, Bret Busby <bret at busby.net> wrote:
>> 
>
>[snipped]
>
>> 
>> I have a couple of last (I hope) questions here:
>> 
>> 1) Do I need to install Thunderbird on the Windows laptop in order to do the
>> migration? It might be a hidden requirement that Outlook is installed on the PC
>> where the migration is being done, but I can't find that info.
>> Or kan I copy the PST files over to Ubuntu and let the migration be handled by
>> TB on Ubuntu?
>
>A caveat: The snap packaged Thunderbird client I'm using doesn't have an 
>option for importing Outlook data. I don't if this a limitation of the 
>snap, or if it applies to the deb packaged version of Thunderbird as 
>well. You probably would be better off doing the importation on Windows, 
>make any adjustments needed, and then export the Windows Thunderbird 
>profile to a zip file which then can be imported with the Linux 
>Thunderbird client.
>

So I made a test by installing the latest version of ThunderBird on my Win10
laptop.
When I started it it asked me to enter account data etc, which I did not.
Instead I went to Home/Import and selected "Import from Outlook"
Then I got to a screen where I could select between:
[v] Accounts and Settings
[v] Address Books
[ ] Calendars
[v] Mail Messages

There is no way to select *which* mail messages or which PST file to import from
or the like...
Apparently it will read *everything* off of Outlook, which means some 15+ GB
worth of messages (probably millions) and such...

I just wonder how long such a conversion would take? Especially if the process
involves "asking" outlook to provide them one by one...

>> 
>> 2) If I have to migrate on Windows, then in order to go to Ubuntu, can I just
>> copy the TB profile to the correct place on Ubuntu and point TB to it there and
>> it will work? I.e. are file formats etc compatible Linux/Window
>
>It should, but I'm not sure the file permissions will be set correctly. 
>Usually, files copied from a NTFS or *FAT filesystem will have +x bit 
>set and will be world readable. Hopefully, Thunderbird will set the 
>permissions correctly when importing from the zip file.
>
That would be the next step, but I wonder about the timing here...


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden