Migrating from KMail to Thunderbird

This week-end, after passing too much time to try to understand contact management in KMail (which was working quite well in KDE 3.x but is completely flawed IMHO in KDE 4.x), I decided with my wife it was time after 8+ years to try another mail reader.

Thunderbird was of course the first candidate, due to the familiarity she had with Firefox, Outlook (at school) and the fact it’s not that different from KMail anyway in its behavior and interface. I must say I was impressed to see my wife just say that she didn’t mind changing Mail reader, in order to get lacking features. Probably her familiarity with Open Source has also created an open mind for computing programs, and the fact she already uses multiple tools without major issue, makes her willing to try new ones.

So I started to work migrating her data from KMail to TB. I found a small program in order to help md2mb.pl. However, it was far from being complete, and I decided to rewrite a new one, based on the ideas from the other one, in order to have a better migration support. So here is a new md2mb.pl which hopefully will be useful for others as well.


#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
# Program to import a maildir kmail environement into a thunderbird one.
# (c) Bruno Cornec under the GPLv2.

use strict;
use File::Find;
use File::Copy;
use File::Basename;
use File::Path;

my $cmd="formail";
# CHANGE AS YOU WISH
my $oldroot = "/beatrice/.Mail.sav";
my $newroot = "/beatrice/.thunderbird/30cq2rn3.default/Mail/Local Folders/";
# Is the newroot a file (1) or a dir (0)
my $nrisfile = 0;
my $debug = 0;
# END CHANGE

$debug++ if ((defined $ARGV[0]) && ($ARGV[0] eq "-v"));
print "DEBUG MODE, not doing anything, just printing\n" if ($debug);
if ($debug) {
print "CMD1: mkdir -p $newroot\n" if ((not -d "$newroot") && (not $nrisfile));
} else {
mkpath("$newroot",0, 0755) if ((not -d "$newroot") && (not $nrisfile));
}
system("$cmd /dev/null 2>/dev/null") == 0 or die "cannot find formail on your \$PATH!\nAborting";

find(\&md2mb,($oldroot));

sub md2mb {

if (-f $File::Find::name) {
return if (
($File::Find::name =~ /\.ids$/) ||
($File::Find::name =~ /\.sorted$/) ||
($File::Find::name =~ /\.index$/) ||
($File::Find::name =~ /\/cur\//) ||
($File::Find::name =~ /\/new\//) ||
($File::Find::name =~ /\/tmp\//));
}
if (-d $File::Find::name) {
return if (
($File::Find::name =~ /\/cur$/) ||
($File::Find::name =~ /\/new$/) ||
($File::Find::name =~ /\/tmp$/));
}
if ($debug) {
print "CURR: $File::Find::name\n";
}
my $destname = $File::Find::name;
$destname =~ s|^$oldroot||;
$destname =~ s|\.([[:alnum:]éèçàù\s]*)\.directory|$1.sbd|g;
if ($debug) {
print "DEST: $destname\n";
}
my $cdir = dirname("$newroot/$destname");
my $outputfile="$newroot/$destname";
$outputfile="$newroot" if ($destname =~ /^\s*$/);
if (-d $File::Find::name) {

my @files = (,);

if (@files) {
if ($debug) {
print "CMD2: mkdir -p $cdir\n" if (not -d "$cdir");
} else {
mkpath("$cdir",0, 0755) if (not -d "$cdir");
}
}
foreach my $file (@files) {
next unless -f $file; # skip non-regular files
next unless -s $file; # skip empty files
next unless -r $file; # skip unreadable files
$file =~ s/'/'"'"'/; # escape ' (single quote)
# NOTE! The output file must not contain single quotes (')!
my $run = "cat '$file' | $cmd >> '$outputfile'";
if ($debug) {
print "CMD3: $run\n";
} else {
print "Copying maildir content from $File::Find::name to $outputfile\n";
system($run) == 0 or warn "cannot run \"$run\".";
}
}
}
if (-f $File::Find::name) {
if ($debug) {
print "CMD2: mkdir -p $cdir\n" if (not -d "$cdir");
print "CMD3: cp $File::Find::name $cdir\n";
} else {
mkpath("$cdir",0, 0755) if (not -d "$cdir");
copy($File::Find::name,$cdir);
print "Copying mailbox content from $File::Find::name to $outputfile\n";
}
}
}

Warning: this code doesn’t work from the blog as wordpress makes some modifications, so download it from here

Run it first with a -v option in order to see what will be done. Be careful as I’ve just fixed the problems I had on my side, but probably not all of them. Especially, take care of file names with “‘” in them. they won’t work well.

So migration has been done, and of course more re-organization of the mailboxes. But now everything works fine, including contact management (that were imported using the LDIF exchange format).

And my wife has already sent a couple of mails, so I guess it will not take her long to be very familiar with TB.

Once again this shows all the power of FLOSS: freedom of choice, no info hidden, open format, and voilà.

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Tags: Linux, perl, script, Thunderbird