How do I migrate email from Kmail to Thunderbird?
I'm trying to migrate from Kmail 4.14.2 on Kubuntu 14.04 to Thunderbird 31.8. None of the Mozilla info seems current, and although I've come across the following: http://oao.no/wpe/2013/04/thunderbird-import-mail-from-kmail/ http://www.ulduzsoft.com/2012/01/from-kmail-to-thunderbird/ they are also a couple of years old, and seem contradictory. I've pointed Thunderbird to the current email directory, and it comes up with the folders, each of them containing cur, new and tmp, so presumably I have to convert the Kmail format (maildir?) to Thundebird format (mailbox).
Any help on how to do this would be very welcome.
All Replies (4)
interesting article. So I will start with the obvious I got from it.
Is your kmail in MBX or maildir files? this is critical and is at the heart of what needs to be done. and what needs to be done is not what that article indicates since V38 released a few weeks ago.
They're in maildir format, but I discovered I can select all the mail in a folder and export it as mbox format.
Using MBOX install this add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/
It adds an import/export entry to the tools menu that imports mbox files.
You can also migrate maildir directly to Thunderbird. While maildir is now supported, it is not really recommended. My opinion "There be bugs in there" and to let others test it for me.
Phew! Thanks Matt - that put me in the right direction. It's funny that add-on doesn't come up when you search for "import export" in Thunderbird. I think it's fair to say I know more now about email formats than I really wanted to know! :-)
I've transferred all (?) my email now - ~12 years' worth. I had originally pointed Thunderbird at the Kmail mail directory, so when I imported the email from the mbox dump I got (eg) "Stuff.mbox", and when I renamed to "Stuff" I got the three folders (cur, new, tmp) under it. I had to delete the redundant .sbd folders for those to disappear. Just in case anyone has that issue. That also solved the problem of an error message when fetching email: "Unable to write the email to the mailbox. Make sure the file system allows you write privileges, and you have enough disc space to copy the mailbox." - once Inbox.sbd was deleted, the fetch was OK.
Kmail for some reason (!) was only giving me a random selection of my emails in some folders, so I used Nathan Yergler's great standalone Python script (https://gist.github.com/nyergler/1709069) to re-export into mbox format. One thing to be aware of is that maildir stores sub-folders in dot folders, so you need to access them directly. The script seems to work for folders 2 deep (ie mail/submail), but not for those 3 deep (ie mail/submail/subsubmail), so it's best to copy subsubmail up to the top level to get the script to process it.
I seem to have most of my email back now - RIP Kmail!
Thanks again.