Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Email Signatures and address book in Thunderbird 2

After having some issues with Evolution 2.12.1 on Gnome, I decided to have Thunderbird replace the Evolution Email client. After installing Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 from the mozilla.com website I needed to transfer the Addressbook from Evolution and add my Email signature. So here are the steps I took.

What is Thunderbird?
  • Handles junk mail using Bayesian filtering and detects scams
  • Handle Emails with views, tags, filters, search and virtual folders help
  • Provide reader for RSS feeds like streams of email with filters, search and labeling
A. Importing Addressbook from Evolution
No, there is no direct import for Thunderbird. Thunderbird support import of addressbook in the form of LDIF, csv and tabs. Evolution could only export addresses with the tool evolution-addressbook-export but this continued to give unexplainable errors that seem rather familiar in previous versions. For the record, here is how the command is used

evolution-addressbook-export --format=csv > ~/Desktop/contacts.evolution.csv
  1. So, what I did in the end was to export the Evolution address with the menu
    File ->Save Address Book as VCard
    Select the Desktop and saved as contactlist.vcf
  2. Use a converter to convert VCard to LDIF. For this example I accessed the site http://labs.brotherli.ch/vcfconvert and uploaded the VCard file. No big deal as there was nothing sensitive. However there were some converters that could be installed on the PC for more peace of mind about sensitivity of the data. I saved the file back as contactlist.ldif

    The idea is to convert VCF to LDIF

  3. In Thunderbird, open the addressbook and choose the menu
    Tools ->Import
    Select the contaclist.ldif file
B. Adding a signature for outgoing Emails.
You can add a VCard or a text/HTML file as a signature.
  1. Adding text signature. Create a textfile with your signature and store it on your harddrive. For example save as signature.nicholas.txt
  2. In Thunderbird choose
    Edit ->Account Settings
  3. Choose a profile and checked
    Attach this signature
  4. Click the Choose button and select the signature file signature.nicholas.txt
  5. Click OK

1 comment:

Alex said...

So,today I went in the net and saw there a lot of good things.But then I had the big problem.Some my contacts in my OE address book were deleted.Fortunately I remembered one of those things-repair wab file.Tool helped me very quickly and free of charge.Besides my friends were lucky with it.

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