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In my quest to do all of my tasks under SUSE Linux, getting all of my 15 years of email history moved to Thunderbird from Outlook turned out to be one of the trickiest. At first I tried to install Thunderbird and Outlook 2002 on the same XP machine and then just having Thunderbird import my email. No luck. Thunderbird (or something) would crash about half way through. I tried this many times without luck. I did some internet searches on the problem but did not find a lot to help. Eventually my wife found this story that addressed my issues very well. What seems to work for most people is to import the email into Outlook Express first and then into Thunderbird. This worked well without a crash. This seems to have preserved both my attachments as well as the formatting in any HTML emails.

So I imported my emails in two passes. Once for my recent email and once more for my old archive.pst file. I had to have outlook switch to that old file as it's main .pst file for this part to work.

I also used Dawn to convert my Outlook Contacts folder into an Outlook Express address book. I also then imported this into Thunderbird.

Once I had all my data in Thunderbird under XP I then had to transfer parts of the directory structure from XP to SUSE. This was accomplished by moving the following file from the XP machine to the SUSE machine:

For the address book:
FROM: C:/Documents and Settings/xpuser/Application Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/RANDOM1.default/abook.mab
TO: /home/suseuser/.thunderbird/RANDOM2.default/

For email message:
FROM: C:/Documents and Settings/xpuser/Application Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/RANDOM1.default/Mail/Local Folders/
The files "Outlook Express Mail.msf", "Outlook Express Mail" and the directory "Outlook Express Mail.sbd" are moved to
TO: /home/suseuser/.thunderbird/RANDOM2.default/Mail/Local Folders

I used xpuser to represent the login in account under Windows XP and suseuser as the login account under SUSE. RANDOM1 and RANDOM2 are random strings that Thunderbird associates with the profile directory and is unique for each installation.

Once all of the new email messages are accessible in Thunderbird under SUSE, it is just a matter of cleaning up any directory structure.