Migrating Outlook .pst file into Thunderbird on Linux
I’ve been slowly trying to move away from Windows/Microsoft and more towards Linux. So far, the move has gone pretty well over all. I’m dual booting just because of two programs that I need Windows to run but outside of that, I’m on Linux. One of the biggest hurdles I found, was attempting to move my email from Outlook over to Thunderbird. I had download the various conversion tools but none of them worked and found that the absolute easiest way was to install Thunderbird on my Windows partition and on its first run, select that you want to import from Oulook.
I then booted Linux and navigated to:
C:\DocumentsandSettings\[windowsuser]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\[jibberish].default\Mail\[mailaccount]
You can then copy the pertinent folders to here:
/home/[user]/.mozilla-thunderbird/[jibberish].default/Mail/[mailaccount]
Just as a reference, I’m running Ubuntu and this took no more than 7 minutes to complete. At this point you can now run Thunderbird and all of your email will appear. The only thing left to do is setup your accounts and any special rules you might have had to automatically drop emails in certain folders on Outlook. Now this process does not copy your address book and only deals with email messages.