Ximian Evolution: Part 2

Exporting your Outlook data to Evolution

Review: Ximian Evolution, a personal and workgroup information management tool for Linux and UNIX-based systems that features email, calendaring, address books, and task list management, is free to use out of the box. A separately licensed add-on, Ximian® Connector, allows Evolution to function as a Microsoft Exchange Client on Microsoft Exchange 2000 or 2003 servers.

Overview

The first article in this series on Using Evolution at UTA gave us an introduction to Ximian Evolution. In the second installment, we'll briefly discuss importing your Exchange personal folders (PST files) into Evolution. Beacause .pst files are formatted in a proprietary way requiring access to the MAPI.DLL library, which can only be read by applications running in Windows, they must first be converted into a format readable by other applications, the standard mbox file. We'll review two methods for achieving this, and provide detailed instructions for doing so.

Microsoft introduced us to .pst files with the deployment of Exchange Server 4.0 as a way to maintain copies of messages locally, on the client computer, rather that storing all messages on the Exchange server, and as a storage format for users who do not have access to a Microsoft Exchange Server (for example those using Microsoft Outlook to retrieve mail from a POP3 server) . More information can be found in Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 208480.

Two applications that can convert your .pst files to mbox format for you are Outport and Mozilla. You will need to run these applications under Windows, before you upgrade your system to Linux. We'll discuss them both:

What is Outport

Outport aims to be a generic program for exporting data from Outlook (Outlook + export = Outport) to various email/pim programs. Currently it can export to the Contact, Calendar and Task formats of Evolution, plus a number of generic formats supported by Outlook itself (Rich Text Format, HTML, vCalendar, vCard, iCalendar, etc)."

To Use Outport:

Visit http://outport.sourceforge.net and download the Outport application.
From Windows, install and run the application according to the instructions on the web page. You will need to know the location of your Outlook .pst files.
Remeber where you place the exported files. They should be somewhere you can access them from your Linux or UNIX system.
From your Linux or UNIX system, run Evolution and import the files by selecting File-->Import.

Note: It may help to have Outlook running while using Outport.

To Import Mail using Mozilla:

If you choose not to use the Outport utility, you can import your mail into Evolution by first converting the .pst files into standard mbox format. An easy way of accomplishing this is to install Mozilla on your Windows machine and importing your Outlook mail into Mozilla mail. Once you've imported into Mozilla Mail, you can export to an mbox file:

Install and run Mozilla for Windows (See mozilla.org for more information).
Start the mailer and open the import tool by selecting File-->Import.
Select "Import Mail from Outlook." If you cannot mount your Windows partition under Linux or UNIX, copy the Mozilla mail files to a directory you can access.
From Linux or UNIX, run Evolution and start the import tool by running File-->Import.

Note: If you are the only user on Windows, the Mozilla mail files will be stored in C:\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\XXXX\Mail\imported.mail\. XXXX will be some collection of numbers and letters ending in .slt.
If there is more than one user, the file will be in C:\Profiles\USERNAME\XXXX\Mail\imported.mail\ where USERNAME is your Windows username and XXXX is some collection of numbers and letters ending in .slt

For each mail folder in Outlook, Mozilla will convert the folder into one mbox file. To import all your mail, import all the files without a .msf extension.

To Import Contacts:

First, you will need to use Outlook to export all of your contact to a .csv file. To do this:

Click on File --> Import and Export....
Choose "Export to a file" and click [Next].
For the file type choose "Comma Separated Values (DOS)".
Click [Next].
For the folder to export choose "Contacts".
Name the exported file contacts.csv (no quotation marks) and place it somewhere you can get to it from Linux.
Click [Next].
Click [Finish].

From your Linux system, you will then need to convert contacts.csv into files that Evolution can understand by you running it through the Perl script csv2vcard.pl. The program is normally installed with Evolution, but if you don't have it, you can download it from the bottom of this page. Put it in your home directory and make the it executable by running the command:
chmod +x ~/csv2vcard.pl

Then, run the script to convert your contacts.csv to contacts.vcf. Use the command:
csv2vcard.pl contacts.csv contacts.vcf

Note: If you did not have csv2vcard installed with Evolution, and downloaded it instead, the command will be ./csv2vcard contacts.csv contacts.vcf

Once you have contacts.vcf, you can import it into Evolution:

Run Evolution
Click File --> Import.
Click [Next].
Click on "Import from a single file"
Click [Next] again.
For file type choose "VCard...".
Click [Browse] and select your file.
Click [Next] then [Import].

To download Mozilla for Windows, visit mozilla.org or download.com.