Moved from Evolution to Thunderbird 2.0.0.22

About 2 weeks ago I migrated all my e-mail from Evolution to Mozilla Thunderbird. The process itself was not difficult. I made the switch because Evolution is too slow for my PC. I also like the option to change the themes in Thurderbird just like Firefox. The current theme I am running for Thurderbird (and Firefox) is Silvermel 1.1.2.

I configured Thunderbird for 2 e-mail accounts as I had with Evolution. My Gmail account is set as default. One thing when setting up multiple accounts from two different servers, be sure to specify your SMTP server for each individual account. For example, after setting up Gmail, I added the second ISP account using the Wizard. When I went back into the ISP account, I noticed my outgoing SMTP server was configured for Gmail. You can check your setting for each account under the menu bar Edit, Account Settings.

So now my accounts are ready, but now I want to migrate my e-mails, contacts, and calendar entries to Thunderbird. I found at Make Tech Easier by Damien.

I install Lightning 0.9 Calendar add-on.  This add-on will give you a PIM system which allows you to manage you daily schedule.  It nice and works well, but I use Google Calendar.  So I installed Provider for Google Calendar 0.5.2.  This add-on allows you to read and write to your Google Calendar.  please note, the Lightning add-on is required.  You will need your Private ICAL address from Google to make this add-on work.  Since I also like to have the US Holidays too, I created a separate Google calendar in Thurnderbird called US Holidays and used the Google public address http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/usa__en%40holiday.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics.

One thing that I could not get from Evolution for some reason was my list of birthdays and special dates.  This was one of those things that I never got around to importing into Google Calendar.  Since I still have Windows XP with Office 2007 on my other HDD, I rebooted into XP and exported my Outlook calendar to a csv file.  After importing the csv file into Google Calendar I opened Thunderbird and verified all my entries were available.  For one reason or another I had to reset the occurrence from “Does not Repeat” to “Yearly”.  More than likely I goofed the original entry way back when.

Everything looks great and is working correctly. But I like to sign my e-mails with signatures for different occasions. Some are funny (at least to me) and some have my personal information. To get this function I installed Quicktext. It’s easy to use and I created about 8 different signatures for my Gmail and ISP accounts. After you compose your message just click on the dropdown above the e-mail body field and choose your signature.

When I receive a message from one of my accounts, Thunderbird has its native popup, which works well but it doesn’t fall in-line with my Ubuntu popup notification. I found this cool addon (which is still under development) called Mozilla Notification Extensions 0.1.2. Be sure to read the “More about this add-on” section.  Once this is installed, turn off the Thunderbird popup notification and restart Thunderbird.

I left Evolution on my PC, but removed the Evolution Alarm Notifier and gmail cal I found several months ago (which allows Evolution to work better with Google Calendar) from Startup Applications.  So far I’ve been pleased with this migration. What I might want to look at is what would it take to migrate my Thunderbird setup to a USB to Windows XP or another Linux distro.