Mailbox conversion
Finally the motherboard of my wife's computer broke down, so I had
to replace it. I could not just get a new motherboard, because
they do not sell boards with "462" sockets anymore. The cheapest
solution was an MSI motherboard with AMD-64 dual core and one gig
of memory. You cannot get anything simpler nowadays. I can clearly
remember the time when such specs would have meant "supercomputer"
(as in "several million dollars").
This operation made her old Windows 2000 unusable. You can run a
32-bit OS on a 64-bit machine, but some things (notably the ATI
display drivers for the new motherboard) refuse to install if the
OS is not 64-bit. A great opportunity to install Linux. I didn't
install Debian itself, but the 64-bit version of Ubuntu. After
some tweaking it works fine, including some difficult things like
Japanese input, printing through the home network, etc. Before
reformatting the Windows hard disk I first copied its contents to
a USB external disk. From there I could restore the mail address
book (Outlook -> Thunderbird) and the browser favorites/bookmarks
(IE -> Firefox). My wife thinks the new system is great.
After all this smalltalk, my real question: I still have lots of
old e-mail in Microsoft format (with names like in-2005.dbx,
out-2006.dbx, etc; some filenames are in Japanese, and the
messages inside the .dbx files are mostly Japanese). I searched
the web for "converting dbx to mbox". Found lots of answers, most
of them seem old, and they do not agree. Is there a "canonical"
way to make .dbx mail archives available to Linux Thunderbird/Icedove?
Regards, Jan
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