Evolve to become Thunderbird

Share Evolution's mail with Thunderbird!

This trick intends to share the e-mails between Evolution and Thunderbird email clients.

Steps.

1. Install Thunderbird from here or use your personal package installer e.g. yum, synaptic etc. :).

Please back-up your mail data before trying below tips. To back-up do

cp -rf ~/.thunderbird thunderbird_backup

2. Launch Thunderbird and create folders or folder where you want to keep shared data. For example I created "work" folder under Inbox.

3. In my case suppose I want to keep evolution's work folder shared with thunderbird..

4. Now go to thunderbird's Local Folder directory which normally resides in your home directory under your profile's path. Mine is

cd ~/.thunderbird/i4hj1uue.default/Mail/Local Folders/Inbox.sbd/

4. Inbox.sbd may not exist untill you haven't created folder in Thunderbird

5. Make a soft link to evolution mail data files which normally resides in your home directory. My evolution's files are at ~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox.sbd/

rm work

ln -s ~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox.sbd/work work

7. Restart Thunderbird. All your evolution's work folder's mails should be appearing under work folder!!

8. You may use Evolution or Thunderbird on your wish. All the mails in the work folder will be visible in both.

If you want to import all evolution mails to thunderbird then link your Thunderbird's folder to Evolution's Inbox. i.e.

ln -s ~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox

9. I guess you got the trick. Now you can choose what to share what to not!!

10. To import address book. Please read this.

11. If things are working well now then you can remove the back-up.