After deciding to switch to Mozilla Thunderbird (which, incidentally is called 'Earlybird') I ran into some rough weather. First off, the latest version, 10.0.2 is not available from the official Ubuntu repositories for Maverick (10.10). So I downloaded the source from the Mozilla FTP archive, which is a whopping 92MB. Fixing dependencies and compiling took extraordinarily long, or so it seemed.
Then began the trouble of migrating all my data from Evolution to Thunderbird.
Filters and Tags:
Migrating filters turned out to be an extremely tricky part. In Evolution the filter philosophy is slightly different. You can have the filters apply colors to messages - e.g. red to important ones, green to interesting ones and gray to unimportant ones. If multiple colors are assigned, the last assigned color stays - so filter order is all that needs to be checked.
In Thunderbird there are tags, and tags have colors. A message can be tagged by one or more filter, and a message can have many tags. The question now is - if a message has two tags, "Priority" (colored red) and "Bulk" (colored gray), what will the message color be? The color will be gray, because tags are 'stacked' in alphabetical order. This happens irrespective of the order in which the filters are applied. The only workaround is to name your tags like this:
"1- Important"
"2- Slightly Important"
"3- Marginally important"
"4- Not important"
etc. This way the color for "1- Important" will dominate over all those below it.
In addition tags are stored internally somewhere, and the name and color are only 'external' properties. Some HTML web clients like Zimbra will show the actual internal tag names.
External Links:
The second part of the problem lies in the inability of Thunderbird to open links. The fix was simple, with clear and step-wise instructions given in this Mozilla Knowledge Base Article.
Then began the trouble of migrating all my data from Evolution to Thunderbird.
Filters and Tags:
Migrating filters turned out to be an extremely tricky part. In Evolution the filter philosophy is slightly different. You can have the filters apply colors to messages - e.g. red to important ones, green to interesting ones and gray to unimportant ones. If multiple colors are assigned, the last assigned color stays - so filter order is all that needs to be checked.
In Thunderbird there are tags, and tags have colors. A message can be tagged by one or more filter, and a message can have many tags. The question now is - if a message has two tags, "Priority" (colored red) and "Bulk" (colored gray), what will the message color be? The color will be gray, because tags are 'stacked' in alphabetical order. This happens irrespective of the order in which the filters are applied. The only workaround is to name your tags like this:
"1- Important"
"2- Slightly Important"
"3- Marginally important"
"4- Not important"
etc. This way the color for "1- Important" will dominate over all those below it.
In addition tags are stored internally somewhere, and the name and color are only 'external' properties. Some HTML web clients like Zimbra will show the actual internal tag names.
External Links:
The second part of the problem lies in the inability of Thunderbird to open links. The fix was simple, with clear and step-wise instructions given in this Mozilla Knowledge Base Article.
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