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I am considering to move away from Windows to Ubuntu. At present trying to migrate my emails from office 2013 to thunderbird with no success. Most importantly is my my personal folder (pst) with all the historical data of the last 5years that i cannot loose.

Please help

Billy Campbell
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  • I'm not sure that asking about migrating from Outlook to Thunderbird, presumably on a Windows OS, is topical here. –  Mar 25 '13 at 11:44
  • new here, if be the case please advise at which platform should be addressed. – Billy Campbell Mar 25 '13 at 11:56
  • http://superuser.com/ should be fine, IMO. –  Mar 25 '13 at 12:01
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    This is easiest if you install Thunderbird bird on your Windows machine. You can then import the mail by following these instructions How to import outlook express mails into thunderbird mail client?. Once you have your mail in Thunderbird you can backup your email then copy it to your Ubuntu machine. – Warren Hill Mar 25 '13 at 12:09
  • Hi Warren, Thanks but tried that several times. Keeps on coming back stating that Outlook is not the default mail account. I have double check "outlook is the default mail account ;-(

    What am i missing?

    Thanks

     – Billy Campbell Mar 25 '13 at 12:19
  • I set up a clean Windows virtual machine, installed Outlook on it, and copied all my .pst files in there. Made sure it was all working as email client. Then I installed Thunderbird and imported the emails. Copied the T-bird profile to my real ubuntu machine, and deleted the virtual one. Profit! – Organic Marble Sep 03 '15 at 04:46

2 Answers2

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There are a couple of good pst viewer files out there which can be used to read the contents of your files. I used pst-utils, available from the software center which output the mail files directly into a thunderbird format - no sweat there.

Contacts are a different beast entirely. The best solution I found starts in Windows/Outlook

  1. Inside Outlook, select all of your contacts, and in the menu bar, choose to send them as 'business contacts' (a huge collection of vcards)
  2. Open the draft mail, and save all of the attachements to a single directory
  3. In a command window, change to that directory and type the command "copy *.vcf big_vcard.vcf", without the quotes
  4. Move this new file (big_vcard) to your Thunderbird machine, start Thunderbird, Open the address book, and undertools, you can import the big_vcard.vcf file

This works OKish - you should check through your imported contact list as sometimes, especially for business with no person name, there is no name on the new contact imported into Thunderbird.

Charles Green
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I think you can add any external PST Viewer or Outlook Add-in to get the desired results. There are many 3rd party tools available for Outlook which can help you in importing, exporting and recovering the PST file easily.

user173183
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