Moving email from Windows to Linux

Well, we finally have all our computers in one place. The sexy black computer (formerly known as “Ron’s” and seen here) now sits on the main desk in the office. The windows box is mostly for the kid’s use, gaming, and if AMD64 (the black one’s name) is in use.

(warning: Hard core techie stuff ahead.)

But all my “stuff” was on the Windows machine and I had to move it over to AMD64, which runs Fedora Core 6. My profile runs the gnome desktop while Ron likes the other one better. K-something, HA! Oh wait, it’s KDE. We can have each profile look and feel completely different from one another.

I’ve spent a large chunk of the past few days moving files onto a thumb drive and setting them up the way I want. The worst part was getting files on and off the drive in Windows. At one point, it took over an hour, but the same files going onto the AMD64 with Linux took literally under a minute. THANKS Microsuck. Eventually, I worked my way around that by zipping up the thousands (literally) of dicky small files I wanted into one big zip file. That took a good thirty seconds to transfer, like it should.

The last and most difficult job was transferring my mail. I already had mailboxes set up on this machine and had to figure out how to merge the old mail from the Windows box with the new mail on AMD64, some of which was interlinked – meaning I had mail from one day and at least one account on both machines.

Since I use Thunderbird on both machines, a quick Google search and I found what I needed. Combining two profiles in Thunderbird. Again, even though the instructions seem complicated and need to be followed precisely, the only problems I had were on the windows box. That machine is set up with two drives. Actually, it has more than that, including virtual, but for this story, let’s go with two. The C drive holds Windows and is supposed to hold nothing else. Anything else that needs to be installed goes on D. Well, Windows is funny, because even though I installed Thunderbird on D, it forced all mail files onto C (among other things). It also marked them as hidden and even after checking to make sure windows file explorer was showing me hidden files, I had to select it again and restart before I could see files I needed. (2 megs for the curious) Another slow transfer, and I walked through merging one of my mail accounts. Presto! It was magically delicious and worked.

Although I now have over 600 emails in one inbox, on top of the subfolders, not counting spam or mailing lists. I still have 3 or 4 other email addresses to do this for, but that was my main email. So hands-down Linux wins this round for usability, even factoring in a different file system and learning curve.