5 Evolution - Importing Emails

Evolution can read the format in which Thunderbird stores its emails (mbox format), so we can use Evolution's import wizard and point it to Thunderbird's mbox files. As you know these files are in subdirestories of ~/.mozilla-thunderbird. The dot before mozilla-thunderbird makes that .mozilla-thunderbird is a hidden directory. To be able to navigate to that directory and pick mbox files, we must tell our file browser (Nautilus if you use GNOME) to show hidden files.

Open a file browser and go to Edit > Preferences. On the Views tab of the File Management Preferences window that pops up, select Show hidden and backup files:

Then close the file browser and open it again. You should now be able to see files and directories that begin with a dot. If this doesn't work, log out and in again.

Now start Evolution. If you haven't used Evolution before, the Evolution Setup Assistant will come up, and you must use it to set up your first email account in Evolution (I'm sorry, but email accounts cannot be imported into Evolution - they all have to be set up manually):

Now that you are in the main program, go to File > Import...:

The Evolution Import Assistant comes up. Click on Forward:

Select Import a single file:

Now click on the folder icon and go to the Mail/Local Folders directory within your ~/.mozilla-thunderbird profiles directory.

In that directory you can find all mbox files from which you can import emails. There should be one mbox file for each mail folder you had in Outlook Express. These mbox files do not have an extension, so don't pick those .msf files you see there.

If you had subfolders in Outlook Express (e.g. subfolders of the Inbox folder), you can find them in extra directories in the Local Folders directory. These extra directories have the extension .sbd:

Of course, you can import mbox files from these subdirectories, too:

Now that you've chosen an mbox file to import, click on Forward:

The default destination folder is Inbox. If you want another folder, click on Inbox:

A new window pops up. Either select an existing folder as the new destination folder, or click on New to create a new one:

After you have selected the destination folder, click on Import:

The selected mbox file is being imported into Evolution:

Afterwards, you can find your Outlook Express emails in Evolution: