[CentOS] Migrate Outlook Express mail to Thunderbird?

Bill Campbell centos at celestial.com
Sat Mar 15 01:27:55 UTC 2008


On Sat, Mar 15, 2008, mouss wrote:
>Jeff Larsen wrote:
>>
>>
>>Taking a different approach than others...
>>
>>Load them back into Outlook Express on a Windows box. Open a gmail
>>account and enable it for IMAP access. Configure Outlook Express for
>>gmail/IMAP and copy the messages to gmail folders. Configure T-Bird on
>>CentOS for gmail/IMAP and copy from gmail to Local Folders. Hopefully
>>you don't have several Gigs of messages. If you already have an IMAP
>>enabled mail account somewhere else, you could use that too.
>
>no need for gmail if he has a machine that can run an imap server 
>(dovecot, courier, ...), as this would be faster.
>
>and yes, if the mailbox is large, that'll take a loooooong time. I don't 
>know which outlook* variants can copy multiple folders at once. Last 
>time I had to do this, I needed to copy folders one at a time and when I 
>reached the last folder, I left the machine for one day... (that was 
>with some outlook 200?).

My normal method of getting mail from an Exchange or other IMAP
server to a local Maildir store is with a python script that logs
into the remote IMAP server, queries for all the folders, then
copies all the messages to the local Maildir (which is usually 
served by courier-map).

We *STRONGLY* recommend that people leave their mail on the IMAP
server, not on their desktop machines as (a) it's on a reliable
server, not the Microsoft Virus Windows, (b) it's easy to move to
a new desktop machine with minimal hassle, and (c) it's available
via webmail or remote secure IMAP when away from the desk.

Over the years I've written scripts to convert from a variety of
mail stores to Maildir including standard Unix mail files, U.W.
IMAP binary mbx format, kmail, etc. 

As I remember the original posting was talking about mail stored
in Microsoft's proprietary binary format, I think the same one
used by Access and Exchange servers.  I have never tackled
recovering data from these formats, and Friends don't let Friends
do Windows.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

It is surprising how much new stuff users find that developers never do.
You put a copy in front of a normal user and they find all these bugs that
you would think developers would find. The real users and developers are
completely different species as far as I am concerned.
    --Linux creator Linus Torvalds



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