Monday 3 September 2007

Import Thunderbird Mail into Kmail

I wanted to import my messages from Thunderbird into Kmail, so I could use Kontact as my entire personal information tool. I could not find a tool anywhere in Kmail / Kontact (or even just right in Kmail) to import mail from another program. After Googling it, I found it should be in Tools -> Import Messages. The odd thing is I didn't have that menu option. Another thing to try is using a tool mozilla2kmail.pl, but that didn't work for me.

Cliff's Notes:
  • make sure kmailcvt is installed. Use Synaptic Package Manager to get it.
  • then in Kontact/Kmail use File -> Import Messages to import messages from Thunderbird.

Story:
Kmail 1.9.1 using KDE 3.5.2

Found some wonky directions here, but that seemed too complicated.

I looked up the Kmail (via the menus in Kontact/Kmail). The help file seemed to be out of date, web address gets rerouted here.

A bit of a beef I have with the Kontact web site is that they don't give you the current revision of the entire package, nor the current revision of the components of the package. I looked at FAQ of the Kontact page. I didn't see a link to an IRC channel, but I tried out
irc.freenode.net #kontact
The channel does exist, but appears to be a small developer's channel. No one seemed to be awake.

The aforementioned mozilla2kmail.pl script had to be run with
chmod +x mozilla2kmail.pl
sudo ./mozilla2kmail.pl
which gave an error that "./home/kat/Mail is not a directory."
To get help you need to type
./mozilla2kmail.pl --help
which is different than indicated ("mozilla2kmail --help")! This command gives me
"You need to install the perl-doc package to use this program."
I install perl-doc using Synaptic Package Manager, but I still get ". /home/kat/Mail is not a directory." after doing a "sudo ./mozilla2kmail.pl"

Did more searching and came up with the Cliff's Notes solution, which works. The only stickler is that when the import runs, it doesn't make it obvious what it wants you to open. I selected the entire mail folder (/home/kat/.thunderbird/fzcc2crp.default/Mail/) which had two folders in it: a "Local Folder" and a "pop.gmail.com folder." This seems to work.

2 comments:

Jonathan said...

Thanks for the post! very helpful! I googled my problem forever trying to import my emails from t-bird.

Anonymous said...

This was very, very helpful!
I am consolidating emails from Evolution and 2 installations of Thunderbird into Kontact/Kmail.

The only quirk in kmailcvt has been that it does not know where the data files reside; My T-bird data is in ~/.mozilla-thunderbird, for example. But that is a minor setback...
Thanks! --Trent T.