shifting emails

[Denise Tzumli]

After a couple of disasters with my computer I'm setting up a backup 
routine.

Current environment is Ubuntu.

I've been trying to do back up this evening, some has worked, some not, 
but I will get there.

I'm having difficulties with email handlers. The default email in Ubuntu 
is Evolution, which I don't like for various reasons, but it took me a 
few weeks to install thunderbird.

Unfortunately I do not know how the Evolution email handling system works.
Mozilla Thunderbird is very similar to Netscape communicator 4. Each 
email folder has 2 files associated with it. One which can get quite 
big, no extension to the name, holds the actual emails, and the other 
the .msf file is the local index file associated with this.

I like Mozilla because I can do as I did with Netscape, file my emails 
by month, and after a couple of months remove them to a cd. I used to 
index them with Google spindle, not sure how I'll go about that - 
problem for later, after successful set up and backup.

What I would like to do is just move my emails from the evolution folder 
to the thunderbird folder. It could be that it would "Just Work", but 
having spent great time and effort getting bpalogin to work, and 
installing Thunderbird, don't want to mess things up.

Which of the 3 evolution files equates to the .msf file? I suspect it 
could be .cmeta (perhaps msf = meta summary file), but 124 bytes is very 
small compared to 4.1 MB of emails.
Any suggestions?




> /home/denise/.evolution/mail/local/april07	4.1MB plain text document
> /home/denise/.evolution/mail/local/april07.cmeta	124 bytes unknown
> /home/denise/.evolution/mail/local/april07.ev-summary	  32.4Kb unknown
> /home/denise/.evolution/mail/local/april07.ibex.index   459.0 Kb unknown
> /home/denise/.evolution/mail/local/april07.ibex.index.data 450.2 KB unknown

> /home/denise/.mozilla-thunderbird/2tn6r9om.default/Mail/Local Folders/Drafts	5 Kb  plain text document
> /home/denise/.mozilla-thunderbird/2tn6r9om.default/Mail/Local Folders/Drafts.msf	2.5Kb plain text document
> /home/denise/.mozilla-thunderbird/2tn6r9om.default/Mail/Local Folders/Inbox	269.7Kb plain text document
> /home/denise/.mozilla-thunderbird/2tn6r9om.default/Mail/Local Folders/Inbox.msf	11.1kb plain text document