Convert Outlook Express .dbx to .mbx for Evolution or Thunderbird in Linux

Preface (as in, you may skip this part if you're just looking for the instructions).

Lately, I've been noticing that my internet would slow to a crawl at around 2-3 o'clock in the morning. On a hunch I checked my router logs.

Wow. Turns out, somebody in Russia and China were hammering my IP with something trying to get into the only Windows box in the house (parents bought a crap Emachine and I left it alone at their request)

Well, my parents use this computer to pay all their bills...

See where I'm going?

So after warning my parents I got the go ahead to install Linux on their box as long as I did the following:

Make it look like Windows XP

Setup their email (they were using outlook express)

And make sure they had an Office Suite.

Okay, none of these are that big of a deal.

XpGnome takes care of it looking like XP.

Evolution will suffice for the email.

Openoffice.org will handle their Office needs.

The difficult part came when I was trying to import their mail over from Outlook Express.

I searched and searched and searched and the only solution I could find was to:

A) Do it in Windows with one of the many tools
B) Use Kmail to do it

Well, I no longer have Windows and KDE is so horrible (in my opinion) that I'd rather go through the trouble of installing XP in a VM before infecting my system with it.

Well, I, being the masochist that I am, decided I was going to try to use a Windows only tool in Wine to fix this.

I found a neat little open source tool called DbxConv so I decided to give it a try.

Not wanting to put forth too much effort, I decided to use the Wine in the Ubuntu repositories (Wine 1.0.1) with

sudo apt-get install wine

I downloaded the tool and and extracted it to ~/Downloads/Dbxconv.

I had the .dbx files that I needed on a flash drive so I copied them over to the same directory (the instructions on the website recommend this).

Next I opened up a command window via wine with

wineconsole cmd

Which opens a DOS box.

Then I navigated to my my folder with:

cd Downloads\DbxConv

Finally I ran

dbxconv.exe *.dbx

And it worked!

Then of course I imported into Evolution and confirmed it working!

Success!

The key here is to open up "cmd" from "wineconsole". Nothing else will work. I've added an entry to the WineApp database and I'm waiting for approval. it is available here.