Thunderbird to Emacs migration

[John Bokma <john@castleamber.com>]

I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird for many years. For the past year
or so I've been using Emacs more and more (first as editor, now also to
access Usenet), and I am wondering how easy migrating from Thunderbird
to Emacs would be and which Emacs email solution would be the best.
Yesterday I read a bit about RMail in the Emacs manual (book), but I am
aware that there are several more packages to work with Email.

Questions:

- which package(s) do you recommend for reading/writing email (I have
  several accounts, most POP3, and one IMAP. Some POP3 accounts use
  SSL/TLS with CRAM)

- is it possible to work directly with the email files Thunderbird
  creates, or do I have to convert them?

Ideally (for me) both programs should be able to use the same mail
files [1]. If not possible I would like to convert my current email to
something Emacs can handle, and start using Emacs for just reading my
email and see how it goes.

Thanks for reading,
John


[1] If I have to quit one program to be able to use the other one it's
    not a major issue, as long as I can keep one set of mail files.

-- 
John Bokma                                                               j3b

Hacking & Hiking in Mexico -  http://johnbokma.com/
http://castleamber.com/ - Perl & Python Development