One of the challenges you may face when converting an office from Microsoft Windows to Linux is that many people archive their emails in PST files. There are PST tools available, but most of them are commercial, since the PST file format is closed and protected by Microsoft. There are several non-commercial methods to achieve roughly the same goal, and in this tutorial we use IMAP (more specifically, courier-imap) to convert all our emails from PST to the Maildir format. The advantage of this approach is that you also lay the foundation for a new mail system, with all your old emails already imported the day you switch over.

This tutorial shows how you can import Outlook Express emails, contacts, and account settings into Mozilla Thunderbird and Evolution. This is quite useful if you want to switch from Windows to Linux but don't want to lose your mails and address book. The procedure should be similar if you use Outlook instead of Outlook Express.

This guide shows how to install the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) on Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) and 6.06 (Dapper Drake) server systems. Zimbra is a full-featured, open source collaboration suite - email, group calendaring, contacts, and web document management and authoring. It has a feature-rich AJAX web interface and is compatible with clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, and Novell Evolution so that mail, contacts, and calendar items can be synchronised from these to the ZCS server. It can also be synchronized to many mobile devices. ZCS makes use of many existing open source projects such as Postfix, MySQL, and OpenLDAP.