Migrating from KMail to Thunderbird: The revenge

After migrating 2 of my kids and my wife from Kmail to Thunderbird last year, I finally decided this week-end to finish the last migration for my first daughter on her Mageia distribution.

I previously made unsuccessful tries, as her environement was different, with many more subdirectories, and special chars, so it didn’t work with the previous version of the script.

Now with the revisions 1389 and 1390 of the md2mb.pl script, I have successfully migrated her environment, without any manual intervention.

Hopefully, seeing the number of times the previous post was looked at, it will be again useful (even more now that it works better:-)) for others. I even clarified the license in revision 1391 for you to use more easily.

Happy migration !

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7 Responses to “Migrating from KMail to Thunderbird: The revenge”

  1. FACORAT Fabrice Says:

    You saved my day !
    I planning to migrate some users away from Kmail as it can no longer be used reliably with /home on NFS :(
    Does your script could work with evolution ?

  2. brunocornec Says:

    Well, in fact it should work for a migration from maildir to mailbox, what ever the tool used. The only hard coded aspect is that at the end it migrates the KMail inbox content to the Inbox of TB.

    I never used evolution (too buggy for me when I tried years ago, and I’m a die hard mutt user ;-) ) so I wonder whether it’s using the /cur/, /new/, /tmp/, … subdirs as well. If not, you’ll have to adapt that part as well. Let me know.

  3. FACORAT Fabrice Says:

    I’m wiling to contribute and do some tests with evolution.
    Is there’s a way to contribute and do a checkout ? or do I have to download the source and send you diff ?

  4. brunocornec Says:

    The easiest would be what you propose (sending a patch based on my tree). If you plan to make lots of modifications, I could isolate that part of the tree and give you SVN write access.

  5. Robert Grasso Says:

    Hello,

    First, one word : THANK YOU ! I recovered all my emails in TB !

    I got your script from trac here :

    http://trac.project-builder.org/export/1391/projects/md2mb/devel/md2mb/bin/md2mb.pl

    There have been some glitches – as I have not been developing for a very long time, unfortunately I won’t take the risk of contributing code – but I will describe my tiny issues :

    I am using a hugh directory structure in my email client, and your script did not recover it entirely; actually :

    - the Inbox mbox itself was recovered correctly with the name :

    Inbox

    - whereas my inbox sub-directory was created with the name

    inbox.sbd (initial lowcase `i’)

    changing the initial `i’ to uppercase `I’ fixed the issue and gave me access to my structure

    - in Kmail, I created several parent directories, in which I never dropped emails – instead, I directed the emails into the subdirectories; your script created successfully the sub-directories, such as

    MySubdir.sbd

    but I could not access them : I had to create empty files such as

    `MySubdir’ (taking care of the case !)

    in order to get access to my structure

    Fortunately, these were minor bugs.

    Regards
    R. Grasso

  6. markus Says:

    Thank you very much!
    That was as painless as migrating kmail should have been.
    I for one would have found a comment line useful, that informs me, that procmail is necessary. It’s not an issue, but would have made the whole experience even smoother.

    • brunocornec Says:

      I just added a message when aborting dur to the lack of formail, than procmail may what you want ton install. Thanks for your feedback.

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