So I'm helping a community development worker from a the remote outback community of Lingarra in the Norther Territory. Computerbank sent these guys a Linux laptop with ubuntu dapper preloaded. We were expecting them to put Windows on it but they are going to stick with Linux...if only their Outlook mail and contacts can be imported across.
So I am giving it my best shot and it hasn't been easy. Painful is one word to describe it. An area that really needs attention.
We had to make outlook the default client to get address book into thunderbird on windows. That was easy. From here we exported address book to LDIF and imported into Thunderbird on Ubuntu. Yay. 800ish contacts. All there. Easy. Nice win for us.
Now the scary part, the mailboxes. 40 of them and 109 of sent item folders! Bah! We set outlook express as the default mailer and get it to import the mail. Thunderbird can import outlook express mail. Yay. So we did that.
And then we tried someones suggestion of copying the whole blahblah.default file onto the linux blahblah.default file caused thunderbird to error message with "Thunderbird is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Thunderbird process, or restart your system." Yuk.
So we reverted to our trashed blahblah.default file and got thunderbird happening again. Yay for the rubbish bin. Our next attempt involved copying the msf and sbd files across. We did a test with one set. Same place/location - .mozilla-thunderbird/blahlah.default/Mail/Local Folders/Inbox.sbd
Hooray! It worked. We then attempted to copy and paste the whole lot across in one go. It didn't work. My friend is now trying one by one again. We'll know more tomorrow. So far we have spent a good 6 hours on this problem. My friend has spent way more time on this. He also has to do the same for his Sent items. Ouch. These things need to be easier. Good on him for his willingness and commitment to break free and go open. One more Linux user in the community. Many more folks are using that Linux laptop too. :)
Next we look at building up a network out of the other 2 computers he has lying around. We might need someone to send a network cable out to Lingarra. I'd like to get out to the community to provide some training and add a few more desktops for community use. Being able to assist over IRC has made things a whole lot easier and my friend is picking things up really quick. :)
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