Help me replace Outlook

I just saved a very old pc from the landfill by installing opensuse. It belongs to a non-profit outfit on a tight budget. They have been running Windows XP on a server that no one there has the slightest idea how to manipulate.

I want to give this opensuse pc to a guy that will need it for the internet, an occasional letter and email. Do you have any tips that I can use to get his Outlook email moved to suse? That sounds like I’m asking to move his email over. What I really want is for him to be able to send and receive email on a windows network.

Hi there,

Sending / receiving email will work completely fine when talking to a mail server on a windows network. You can just set up Thunderbird to use his account settings, and you should be fine. Thunderbird supports both POP3 and IMAP so either way you should be set.

Email protocols are standard regardless of what OS you are running. Mostly.

If he is authenticating through MS Exchange or on a VPN this will complicate things.

Pete

If you really need to use outlook just install crossover.

Thanks for the info. I didn’t think of Crossover (or wine) and no one there would know if they are running an Exchange Server.

One thing really bugs me about this forum. I searched on “New Posts” and this thread did not pop up. I couldn’t believe that there would be no replies, so I kept looking and here they are. But, I often have interests in many threads and won’t remember to look for something new in each one. /rant off

I’ll start with the easy stuff first: Thunderbird. Won’t Kmail get the job done?

Won’t Kmail get the job done?

Of course it will. Its what I’ve been using for last few years.

If you want to access exchange mail evolution is your best bet
@jaybott outlook doesn’t work with wine or Crossover

Geoff

This is incorrect - Outlook 97-2003 works fine over Crossover, only 2007 doesn’t.

Being a devoted KDE user, is there something comparable to this Gnome app?

Well I use Thunderbird. Works just fine.

But can you access an exchange server with Thunderbird, so far i’ve only been able to do it with evolution. @Chrysantine ok i stand (sit) corrected)

/Geoff

@geoffro

  	 			But can you access an exchange server with Thunderbird

Yes. No problem. That is if you mean to use it as a mail server?

IF they have an Exchange Server, will Thunderbird access it?

Certainly. But the server has to be set in such a way to allow it, otherwise you get a failed connect ‘whatever_name is not an IMAP’ or something to that effect.

You need to get your exchange admin to make sure it is set to do IMAP

While it won’t work in Wine, it will work in Crossover (true of Outlook 2000 through 2007, all of which I’ve tested personally). However, Evolution was specifically designed as an Outlook replacement for Linux (note that Evolution is not available for Windows, while most Linux distributions include it). Also, like Outlook, Evolution is a nice POP3/SMTP client as well (and, like Outlook, I prefer it to Thunderbird, or even KMail).

Has anybody tried migrating from Evolution to KMail? I’m currently on OpenSuSE 11.1 64-bit using Evolution. I’ve used evolution for several years on Ubuntu and now for several months on OpenSuSE after abandoning Ubuntu.

Yes, I’ve used Thunderbird before, and never will again.

I have to admit the “concept” of Evolution is great, but the implimentation just sucks. It is constantly in a fix-it-break-it-fix-it cycle almost as if there is no code control being used by the developers at all. WAV sound works-breaks-works-breaks…SPAM control used to work on Ubuntu, but on OpenSuSE it doesn’t matter if you try to use Bogo or SpamAssasin, it simply doesn’t work. It says it works and says it is learning, but you will get the same (^)(&)(&Uing email from the same (^)(&)(*ing sender time and time again. Absolutely nothing actually gets filtered.

I have saved a few messages to disk and opened them with KMail. I must admit, KMail has a much nicer look and feel…even if it wouldn’t run under icky-nasty-foul-your-own-nest-Gnome without installing all of KDE.

Has anybody tried migrating from Evolution to KMail, and if so, what should I watch out for?

Does SPAM filtering actually work in KMail…unlike Evolution?

I really wish IBM would pick a mail client to integrate with Symphony…that would end all of this needless effort maintaining 37 different apps that only half-*ssedly fill the actual need.

I just migrated from Evolution to Kmail. I saved from Evolution all the settings i had(old emails, contacts,etc) via the menu options. Then I installed 11.1 and kde(instead of gnome). I noticed that the default email is Kmail and i imported whatever was saved from Evolution. I had only one isse when I tried to import some folders which were empty(and I was warned by Kmail) and it crashed. After that I imported one more time folder by folder my emails and everything was fine. To be honest I don’t use all the functionalities in Kmail like filtering but it seems that I get less junk that i remember in the windows world. it might be that the provider filters them for me. If you need details I can try to provide more details.(some step by step instructions eventually). Good luck!

I don’t use any of these. So, what’s wrong with Thunderbird?

I used KMail when I was using the KDE Desktop and of course Evolution when in Gnome, and I like both, and I also had used Thunderbird too, even when using Windows, but I used Outlook Express there, as well as Outlook which I also have a copy of, but had used Calypso and Incredimail in Windows as I liked the mail notifiers it had, like when I ran a desktop wallpaper of a lake for example, I had Incredimail set up to have submarine sounds, then the sub would surface, the hatch would pop up and a guy’s voice would say, “E-Mail.” Sometimes I had a butler come out to say “You have mail, sir.” I will say though that for a while, when I brought Evolution up, that it would go off the screen to the left and right-hand side, and I had tried reducing the size, but it still would be off the screen for some reason, even when not maximized and not restored either and moving the cursor back and forth, the smallest would still show off the screen, even using 1280 x 1024 resolution, but that has seemed to have corrected itself somewhere down the line, unless they had an update or upgrade to it.

I haven’t used Outlook for some time, as it was a 2006 version, but it seems to be close to Evolution in some ways, if instead of bringing Evolution up, like if you like the calendar and appointments besides e-mail, I occasionally click on the date and time on the desktop, which shows the calendar, then double-click on the date and then Evolution opens with the appointments, e-mail link and the calendar, etc., but I have just noticed that once I do that one time, then even clicking on the Evolution Icon will open Evolution with the same options or setup showing, instead of the way I had Evolution set up, which was to start in the Inbox and only show the buttons to the other features, but once clicking on the date and time, then on the date, now Evolution opens that same way even when clicking on only the Icon.

Oh yes, as far as e-mail filtering goes, I used to use a program in Windows for that, but I can’t remember the name of it, since that was in Windows and I stopped using it after a while because I didn’t really use it much or I didn’t need it much. I just ignore the spam messages and I see the message topics and headings and a preview and I just delete them, and I sometimes even delete multiple messages by highlighting the top message that I want deleted, then scrolling down to the last message that I want deleted, as long as there aren’t any inbetween that I want to save or read, I’ll hold the Shift button down, then click on the message, which will highlight that message and all of the messages inbetween and will delete all of the ones I don’t want, or I’ll read all that I want to read and/or save first, then just highlight the top and bottom message and delete them all at once.

I’ll also say that my ISP, the telephone company, has made some sort of agreement with Google, so my e-mail gets filtered through the Google servers now, so if you want filtering and can’t seem to get it to work too well, try getting or using a Gmail address as it seems to filter out quite a bit, but I still will check Google or GMail itself, just in case anything that I want is being filtered out, and they delete filtered e-mail once per month I think, so filtering is working great for me.

Oh yes, it was called K9 I believe as far as the e-mail filtering goes, but it was limited to POP mail accounts and didn’t work for SSL types of connections, and I don’t believe it worked for IMAP either.

K9 is only for Windows or MAC-based computers though.