I’ve been using Thunderbird for years now on Windows, managing email for work. For me it’s more efficient and I can find things faster. However for personal mail I’ve always used Evolution even back when it was Ximian. It is an excellent PIM and has served me well over the years. But I decided to switch to Thunderbird the other day. The main reason is for simplicity and managing upgrades a little easier.

So moving mail wasn’t a big deal both use mbox format, copy the files that’s it, but contacts was another story. So my delima was add contacts manually or find a way to convert. Evolution can export contacts in CSV or VCF format but Thunderbird can only import CSV or LDIF. One might say no problem use CSV as it’s common with both. Well for me that wasn’t the case as the Evo export had some interesting labeling and when walking through the Thunderbird import more fields were wrong than right.

I wasn’t really ready to do that so I went looking for a way to convert VCF to LDIF. That’s when I found vcf2ldif. Cudos to Ryan Mills for creating this Java app as it did the trick and saved hours of manual work. I ran into a couple of errors on some address books relating to the number of fields per record, or so it seemed. But removing unnecessary lines in the VCF files fixed it.

SWEET !!!