How to quickly migrate mail from Evolution to Thunderbird with Dovecot

Fedora 22 is just around the corner and while upgrading my machine, I decided to completely ditch Gnome’s Evolution in favor of Mozilla Thunderbird. I had already switched a while back, but still had tons of mail in an old local Evolution account I wanted to migrate.

Unfortunately all HowTos I found on the web assume Evolution would store mail in the mbox format, while it switched to maildir in version 3.2.0. MozillaZine suggests to first convert maildir to mbox and then import the resulting files with the ImportExportTools extension. Why so cumbersome if there is the excellent Dovecot IMAP server that can read both maildir and mbox?

Migrating mail with Dovecot is straight forward. Quit Evolution and install dovecot:

yum install dovecot

Then set it to use Evolution’s local storage as mail location:

echo "mail_location = maildir:~/.local/share/evolution/mail/local/" \
 >> /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf
service dovecot start

Fire up Thunderbird, configure a new account for your user on localhost and copy over all mail from this account to the “Local folders”. There you go!

Beteilige dich an der Unterhaltung

2 Kommentare

  1. Thanks for posting. Got as far as “Fire up Thunderbird,” but got stuck on “configure a new account for your user on localhost”. I can get into a dialog in Thunderbird called “Mail Account Setup” and I’ve tried as email address myname@localhost (well you have to try something) but this got me nowhere.
    Could you please post a bit more detail about what needs to be done in the Thunderbird program? Thanks

    1. Sorry for the late reply.

      “myname@localhost” is correct for the email address. The server is “localhost”, your username “myname” and your password is your unix password. This should do, but you need to use the manual setup as Thunderbird won’t autodetect any of this.

Schreibe einen Kommentar

Deine E-Mail-Adresse wird nicht veröffentlicht. Erforderliche Felder sind mit * markiert