Background is that I have been using Evolution for my MUA for a number of years. Migrated to Evolution from Mozilla Mail. I only use Evolution for email and contacts. Getting bored with the issues (frequently not being able to exit and needing to kill it; Bug Buddy popping up in GNOME, etc) that Mark (MHR) and I and I'm sure others have experienced.
About 24 hours ago, I installed Thunderbird (on CentOS 5.2 32 bit) and am testing it with this mailing list. So far, Thunderbird doesn't seem to have any issues, based on this very quick trial.
The Thunderbird documentation says that it uses mbox files, but if so, where_are_they? Here's what it says:
http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/faq#import
Thunderbird's mail files are in the standard plain text "mbox" format, which almost all mail programs can use or import. Many proprietary mail programs have a function to import from Eudora, which also uses the "mbox" format; this function should read your Mozilla mail files properly.
Your mail files are inside your profile (see the Profile Folder), in the Mail and (if you use IMAP) ImapMail folders. Each mail folder (Inbox, Sent, etc.) is stored as two files — one with no extension (e.g. INBOX), which is the mail file itself (in "mbox" format), and one with an .msf extension (e.g. INBOX.msf), which is the index (Mail Summary File) to the mail file. Tell the other program to import mail from the file with no extension.
However, in the imap.gmail.com folder INBOX.msf file properties, Type is shown as C source code and MIME type is shown as text/x-csrc
and I cannot find the mbox files....
In Evolution: Inbox has type: Mailbox file and is shown as MIME type: application/mbox
If someone on the list can point me to where the mbox files for Thunderbird on Linux are located, that will be much appreciated. I do not want to migrate from Evolution to Thunderbird, unless my email will continue to be in the mbox format, in case I eventually decide to migrate from Thunderbird, to another MUA. TIA!