Migrating from Outlook on Windows to Thunderbird on Linux Mint 18.3

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Woodburner

Migrating from Outlook on Windows to Thunderbird on Linux Mint 18.3

Post by Woodburner »

The last big hurdle in my migration from Windows to Linux was email. Not the ongoing stuff, that just works, but all the legacy emails I’ve built up over the years. As I’m sure it is for many folk, my email client has become a de facto filing cabinet. I had a 1GB PST file sitting on Outlook 2013 and I needed to get those emails in to Thunderbird on my Linux PC. Thankfully, this was more straight forward than I thought it would be and there are several good articles on the subject as well as some useful free tools.

My start point was this excellent article by Scott on PaperStreet.

https://www.paperstreet.com/blog/how-to ... ird-email/

This walks you through the process of migrating email from Outlook in to Thunderbird on a Windows PC. If you're running Outlook then you already have a Windows PC to use as your migration platform. I can add a couple of my own thoughts on the migration process and things that worked better for me when considering this as a move to ultimately have all my emails in Thunderbird on a Linux box.

1 – Before you import mail in to Thunderbird on Windows, make a copy of the original Thunderbird mail files. These are stored in a hiddeen file so you will have to show hidden files. The files can be found at: C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\XXXXXXXX.default\Mail

Copy the whole mail folder. Inside it, assuming you set up your email account in Thunderbird beforehand, you will see a folder for your mail account and a folder called"Local Folders". Save the copy of the "Mail" folder somewhere else on your PC.

2 – Import mail in to Thunderbird as per the instructions in Scott's article. If you're hapy with the way your Thunderbird mail client looks then fine, you're good to go to step 3. For me though, and I may have made a mistake, the emails were imported as a sub-directory of my primary email account inbox. Given that I wanted to add additional email accounts, I thought it would be more logical to have all my "archive" folders in "Local Mail". To do this I made a copy of the post import "Mail" folder as per point 1. I then opened the post import "mail account" folder and copied the contents in to the post import "Local Folder" folder. I then replaced the working "Local Folder" with this version and also replaced the working "mail account" folder with the original saved copy.

This gave a me clean mail account inbox ready to sync all my mails and a local mail folder containing all my old emails from Outlook. That's how I want Thunderbird to work in both Windows and Linux.

3 – Test you email account works and that you can move new mail in to the folders that should now appear under Local Folders. If you're happy with all that then you are ready to migrate the Thunderbird mail from Windows to Thunderbird on Linux and thankfully this is really easy.

Creat a copy of the working Mail folder from Thunderbird on Windows as per point 1 and put this on a USB or shared drive.

4 – Import the windows Thunderbird Mail files in to Thunderbird on Linux. On the Linux PC, make sure Thunderbird is closed and locate the folder root\home\username\.thunderbird\xxxxxxxx.default\Mail.
Replace this with the copy of the "Mail" folder from your Windows PC. Start Thunderbird. You should see the exact same folder structure as you do on Thunderbird on a Windows PC.

Happy days!
Last edited by Pierre on Mon Jan 22, 2018 9:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Migrating from Outlook on Windows to Thunderbird on Linux Mint 18.3

Post by deepakdeshp »

That's nice information
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Re: Migrating from Outlook on Windows to Thunderbird on Linux Mint 18.3

Post by Susan12 »

Yes, great info provided here. I will definitely try this.

I had no problem getting thunderbird going, but still have to import all the old mail.
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Re: Migrating from Outlook on Windows to Thunderbird on Linux Mint 18.3

Post by AZgl1800 »

Great Write-up:

Thunderbird is really picky when creating accounts.

it seems like it is always the 3rd try to get everything right.

But, once it is done, I like the way Thunderbird works....

but, most of the time, I use Yahoo webmail as my primary "take a look" and see what I have place.

I have Thunderbird set up to store everything back into Yahoo's folders, simply because that is where I have over 20 years of stored documents..... nearly everyone who is important to me has a folder.

IE, once during a long lawsuit as a result of a 18 wheel trucker who ran over me, my lawyer in the 3rd year asked me if I had a copy of a certain email that documented something really important...

I pulled it up in less than 5 minutes and forwarded it back to him.
He was flabbergasted beyond belief.

but, Thunderbird is highly configurable, and I do use it a lot.
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silver_whiskers

Re: Migrating from Outlook on Windows to Thunderbird on Linux Mint 18.3

Post by silver_whiskers »

Those who may be about to dump Windows for Linux I recommend doing the following.

Install Thunderbird on your Windows machine. Get it working and your folders all organised in the manner you prefer, including all your old archives and what-have-you.
Then go to the Thunderbird help pages where you will find information on how to move all your folders and settings from Windows to a Linux machine.

There are versions of Chromium which work on Linux and have a Windows install ... if you are not a Firefox user.

Last week I fixed a friend's Windows-10 problems. Maybe the rotating storage amplified the slowness compared to running an SSD (my other W7 machine is still pretty nimble) but I am so glad that I didn't go that route with my OS.
silver_whiskers

Re: Migrating from Outlook on Windows to Thunderbird on Linux Mint 18.3

Post by silver_whiskers »

Further to my previous post: I now have a machine that dual boots either Windows-7 or Mint 18.1. Mint is installed on its own SSD, W7 on the pre-existing rotating storage. Some editing of the FSTAB file and I have access to the W7 disk structure via the Linux root directory entry "/drive-C".

The W7 installation was already using Thunderbird to access my Gmail account via IMAP. So the simplest way to get at my Gmail account without having synchronization problems was to use the same configuration information within Linux.

This was achieved by editing the profiles.ini file. Take a copy of the original .ini file just in case.... then point Thunderbird to the profile stored in the W7 file system. My .ini file now looks like this:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=0
Path=/drive-C/Users/<yourname>/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles/<yourprofile>.default
Default=1


That gets your mail accessible on either OS, the address book is a different challenge!
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Re: Migrating from Outlook on Windows to Thunderbird on Linux Mint 18.3

Post by pastic »

silver_whiskers wrote: Tue May 08, 2018 6:04 am My .ini file now looks like this:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=0
Path=/drive-C/Users/<yourname>/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles/<yourprofile>.default
Default=1
A couple of years ago I lost all my email in Thunderbird when the profile went corrupt between reboots. When troubleshooting I was told on the Mozilla Community that this corruption was actually due to a known bug in TB that could trigger if one ran Thunderbird under the named "default" profile. Simply launching TB's profile editor and changing the name was enough to step out of the danger zone. This was quite some versions back, so I would not be surprised if they had fixed the bug, then again it had been present long over many versions so maybe it was not so easily fixed. I mention it here, since it could be a nice extra move to take.
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Re: Migrating from Outlook on Windows to Thunderbird on Linux Mint 18.3

Post by cliffcoggin »

Well done Woodburner. By far the most difficult part of my transition from Windows to Linux a year ago was importing 7000 old emails from Outlook Express to Thunderbird. Eventually I paid about £30 for some software that did the job for me.
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Re: Migrating from Outlook on Windows to Thunderbird on Linux Mint 18.3

Post by Mike-Linux-Mint »

Thanks for the tips!

By the way, I'm thinking about using Thunderbird but I'm afraid of losing my emails from my original Gmail address and I was wondering if Thunderbird would erase all my original emails or not? I'm using Gmail on my phone and I can't afford them to be erased.
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Re: Migrating from Outlook on Windows to Thunderbird on Linux Mint 18.3

Post by Moem »

That depends on the server settings. You can simply set it to leave all messages on the server, if that's what you prefer.
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Re: Migrating from Outlook on Windows to Thunderbird on Linux Mint 18.3

Post by Petermint »

I like the flexibility of Thunderbird. For most accounts, I set up Thunderbird to leave mail on the server for 100 days. That gives me plenty of backups of the notebook before the original mail deletes. For 100 days, I can also access the mail through the mail server's Web interface while travelling.

Anyone who has multiple computers/tablets can set up a second Thunderbird to access the same mail account and set that Thunderbird to leave mail on the server forever. I used that configuration when using a workstation at home and a notebook on the road back in ancient history before SSDs reached 1TB.

For a Windows to Linux migration via a dual boot, I usually set up a second NTFS partition for data files and access that partition in Linux. Thunderbird can then run on both Windows and Linux. Trying to use files from the Windows OS partition in Linux sometimes produced weird results.
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Re: Migrating from Outlook on Windows to Thunderbird on Linux Mint 18.3

Post by Kirara »

Thanks a lot Woodburner (and everyone else) for taking the time to write this down!

I think the information in the linked article might not be 100% accurate anymore.
Reason is that Thunderbird meanwhile again should be able to directly import Outlook data without the need to install any third party tools.


What worked for me some three months ago was:
  1. Download and Install Thunderbird to the Windows PC
  2. Using Thunderbird, import Outlook data into Thunderbird.
  3. Copy Thunderbird data to the Linux Mint PC

What didn't work in my case:
  • Folder names in Japanese kanji couldn't be imported into Thunderbird for some reason.
  • Folder names starting with a "#" as well couldn't be imported.

Some additional notes:
  • As a matter of design, your Linux Mint installation probably won't use the most recent version of Thunderbird.
    For this reason I can't tell whether there could be any compatibility issues raising from downloading and installing the most recent Windows version and then migrate to a probably older Thunderbird version on Linux Mint.
  • For the last part from above directions (Copy Thunderbird data to the Linux Mint PC) I wrote a step-by-step instruction based on the linked fosswire article.
    If anyone is interested I'd be glad to post it here.
  • I think (and it has been mentioned in this thread) there actually are third party tools out there which will do the whole migration just fine by their own.
    As the above process worked for me I however didn't look any further into this.
  • Sometimes Google Takeout will be recommended to help you to migrate from Outlook to Thunderbird.
    If you don't already use Gmail anyway and thus are clear about what Google might or might not do with your data (terms of service), I recommend you to not to follow this path because of privacy reasons.
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