Migrate Outlook into Thunderbird?

[Bo Berglund]

On Thu, 13 Jul 2023 21:28:32 +0200, Bo Berglund <bo.berglund at gmail.com> wrote:

>On Thu, 13 Jul 2023 15:02:48 +0200, Bo Berglund <bo.berglund at gmail.com> wrote:

>It seems like readpst is designed to only dump the *messages* and nothing more.
>And TB seems not to like importing these without the profile itself.
>
>Do I have to create the GMail profile again in TB and then somehow import just
>the messages into that TB profile?
>
>I use my GMail profile for this test because that PST is pretty small, GMail is
>not my main mail account.
>The main account is about 30 times bigger...

So I have now found what I did not understand about readpst before:

There is an additional argument -r needed for it to produce the mbox files, like
this:

readpst -M -e -r -o gmailbosse GMail-Bosse.pst

-r = Changes the output format to Recursive. This will create folders as named
in the PST file, and will put all emails in a file called "mbox" inside each
folder.

This worked fine and I have now converted my 7 pst files and it did not take
very long.
Even for the biggest pst files less than a minute.

It took a lot more time to transfer the pst files from my laptop to the server
and then on to the test machine running LinuxMint. The devices are on different
locations so I had to send them via the Internet through a VPN channel...
Luckily I have fiber connections on both places.

Still, now it seems like I have to create the email accounts manually in TB and
then test importing the old emails to it via the mbox files.

Someone suggested to use the mbox files directly by just moving them into the
ThunderBird profile, how can that work?

Is TB using mbox as its own storage system?


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden