Talk about nightmare on Robson Street!
A few weeks ago I decided to export about half a gig of accumulated email from Evolution on my Ubuntu partition to Outlook 2007 on my Vista partition <insert Vista jokes here>. Why? Last year I was doing a lot of C and C++ development so I was living in Linux-land and rarely using Vista. This year the tables have turned.
What a hassle. I use net mail now, but there’s a lot of data in the local folders that I need to access from Vista. Outlook uses EML format files, and Evolution uses MBOX files.
I discovered that there’s no direct way to do this. There’s a lot of information on the net for people who are migrating from Outlook 07 to Evolution, but not much about the other direction. There is, however, an add-on for Thunderbird that lets us export MBOX files as EML files for import to Outlook. Here’s the circuitous but effective solution I ultimately used:
- Download and install Thunderbird in Vista.
- Reboot in Ubuntu and copy the Evolution mail files to the Vista partition.
- Reboot in Vista and put the Evolution files in the appropriate Thunderbird directory (based on http://maketecheasier.com/how-to-migrate-from-evolution-to-thunderbird-in-ubuntu-intrepid/2008/12/04, though I didn’t install Thunderbird in Ubuntu).
- Download and install this Thunderbird add-on which, I think, was written by some helpful Dane (http://nic-nac-project.de/~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html).
- For each mail folder in Thunderbird, use the add-on by right-clicking the folder and choosing Tools – ImportExport in mbox/eml format – Export all messages in the folder – EML format.
- Open Windows Mail (in Vista, this replaced Outlook Express).
- In Windows Mail, choose File – Import – Messages – Windows Live Mail, and find the folder containing the files you just exported from Thunderbird.
- There’s some tweaking here. I think you’re supposed to be able to import all the files at once, but it only worked file by file for me. Laborious, but it worked.
- Open Outlook 2007 and Import from Windows Mail. This should copy everything from Windows Mail to Outlook.
- If you’re hard-drive space conscious, delete the mail folders from Windows Mail. delete the mail folders from Thunderbird and then uninstall Thunderbird.
It took a while, so if you can find a better solution let me know.
