Migrating M$ Outlook 2000 data to Evolution

What is this about?

So you are using Linux and like it - but still Outlook is quite handy and apart from this holds all your archived data? That were my problems at least until I tried Evolution (e.g. from here). Now about migrating the data: Of course Outlook has only binary formats, but there is lots of help on the net. Still it took me one night to collect the right infos and scripts which I hope to spare you. There are these sections:

• Migrating e-mail folders
• Migrating contacts
• Getting birthday reminders

Migrating e-mail folders

With slight changes I followed the information provided here.

• Open all the .pst files you want to migrate, i.e. usually Outlook shows you the content of the current .pst file in the normal mode. But older items (e.g. sent-mail) will be stored to a file called archive.pst which you might want to open additionally using Outlooks file menu.
• Install Mozilla Thunderbird on your windows system.
• Select to import data from Outlook (2000) when starting Thunderbird after installation.
• Locate the data imported by Thunderbird: For every mail folder there will be a file in the only subfolder of Windows\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\ (you might need to replace default by your Windows username) (Application Data is called Anwendungsdaten in the German version). For a folder called XYZ the corresponding mbox file will be called XYZ - there is no filename extension.
• Collect all files and put them on a CD, memory stick or make them available to your Linux in another way.
• Import to Evolution: Import, single file, mbox format.

Migrating contacts

Using Thorsten Roggendorf's Ruby script csv2vcard this was not too hard.

• Export contacts from Outlook using it's file menu into comma separated values (csv). If you have several contact folders you have to create one file per folder.
• Download csv2vcard to Linux (install Ruby if not included in your distribution).
• In the new directory run ./csv2vcard.rb exports.csv imports.vcard
• If you get any error messages you might have some headings in your csv file csv2vcard does not understand. To check this open csv2vcard.rb with a text editor and have a look at line 30. It says Title,Anrede,Titre\r and in the next line all other possible values follow. You should only use the ones listed there.
• Import to Evolution: Import, single file, vcard format.

Getting birthday reminders

Using the python script by Stefan Goetz helped a lot. It needed small changes, so download it here.

• I assume the vcard files to be in the same directory as the python script.
• Run python makeBirthdayReminders.py imports.vcard X > imports.ics
  Where X is the number of days before the birthday you want a reminder to pop up.
• Import to Evolution: Import, single file, ics format.
• If you happen to receive error messages check the .py code. In this
section:

     def __init__(self, vcard):
        if hasattr(vcard, 'N'):
            try:
	    	name_tokens = vcard.N.split(';', 1)
            	self.name = "%s %s" % (name_tokens[1], name_tokens[0])
            except:
	    	self.name = None
        else:
            self.name = None
        try:
            self.bday = time.strptime(vcard.BDAY, " %Y-%m-%d")
        except AttributeError:
            self.bday = None
      

The problem is probably parsing and exactly matching the vcard data: "%s %s" and " %Y-%m-%d" (note space!).