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I've used mu4e previously and really liked it, have had a new laptop for about a year during which I started with the default thunderbird application, and never got around to setting up mail in emacs. I'd like to rectify that.

Using Thunderbird, I have several (around 20) accounts (google, and non-), calendar (lightning), lots of attachments, and chat logs.

My question is:

What are all the things I should back up, migrate, and consider in moving from Thunderbird to mu4e with offlineimap so as not to drop anything thunderbird has done for me? Especially:

  • Are there ways to safely reduce duplication, such as a way to point my emacs email setup at the mailbox directory thunderbird uses?
  • I have some email accounts that I no longer have live access to, but have as backups. How can I transfer these?

(I'm running on ubuntu, if that helps.)

Drew
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Mittenchops
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  • I'd say you can do that if your thunderbird emails are organized in Maildirs, which is the format [mu4e](http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Mu4e) supports. – Ehvince Mar 06 '17 at 07:42

1 Answers1

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Thunderbird uses a modified mbox format to store its mails. Using the same mail in mu4e that was downloaded by thunderbird, will be difficult as it will require on-going conversion between modified mbox of Thunderbird and maildir of mu4e. I haven't come across any good tool for converting maildir to modified mbox of Thunderbird, last I checked 2 years ago.

Separately downloading mail for mu4e (offlineimap might work for this, but I like mbsync better) is safer IMHO, though it does cause duplicates like you say.

The backup mail you have is the easiest to deal with. One time conversion from Thunderbird's mbox to maildir works pretty well with https://www.gerg.ca/hacks/mb2md/.

Jeeves
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  • Dead link. but here is the original perl script http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/, some others [on github](https://gist.github.com/mems/802213a81ab819afda66083e25e85684) and a disambiguation when dealing with [Thunderbird's mbox to maildir](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Maildir) – Flint May 13 '21 at 22:37