I recently got Ubuntu 10.04LTS up and running on my Toshiba Satellite (1G RAM, 80G HD, AMD dual). It is dual booted alongside a Vista partition that has been running for three years on this laptop. I found something that might be of interest to others.

If you have ever had to move to another PC, you know the difficulty in getting everything ported over. This is especially true if you're like myself and save and categorize nearly every email. I wanted a way to connect to my mail stores on the Vista partition so that they would be available in both places. The answer was the mail client I already used: Thunderbird.

Install Thunderbird on your Linux partition. Set up your mail accounts as normal.

Set up /etc/fstab to automatically mount your Vista (or XP) partition upon boot up. Check man fstab if you need help on this one. Mine only needed a single line added to etc/fstab.

Boot your Vista partition and open Thunderbird. Right click on Local Folders (where most local mail folders are kept, mine were) and choose Settings. Note or write down the path to the local folders store.

Reboot into Linux, check to see that your Vista partition mounts. It is probably helpful to make a symbolic link to the partition (ln -s /media/something /home/username/mysomething or similar).

Start Thunderbird and do the same thing you did on Vista; right click on Local Folders and choose Settings. In the location box, either write in the path or BROWSE to the path (probably more reliable) you originally wrote down. The only difference is that if you made a symbolic link to the partition, you would start there.

Restart Thunderbird and you should now see your original Vista local folders pop open. This keeps your saved mail stores synchronized in both OS'es.