transferring my Thunderbird mail to Ubuntu

I tried to do this myself, but found I was much better off following this guide here. Make sure you don’t do what I did - fiddle around with Tbird before following his outline — because you’ll have to uninstall / reinstall everything again.

But this brings me right back to my earlier issue - the fonts in Ubuntu are too big! Everything looks bigger and unable to fit onto my screen anymore, and it’s driving me crazy! (I like things to be accessible right away, and I absolutely hate scrolling). In Tbird, all my email data would get cut off (like the recipient, date, etc) - couldn’t even see it!

So I tried to change the font size natively in Tbird’s Preference Menu. Funny how it has a whole Font section under Display, but nothing ever changes. So I gave up on that, and checked out my Font pref’s right on Gnome (System -> Pref -> Fonts). There are 4 choices, and all are Sans-Serif size 10 by default. Well, Ubuntu’s default Sans is not that great. I tried playing with it (I actually went through every single option), and watched the changes on my desktop &/or my applications, documents….but none were really doing it for me.

To be sure, I checked my screen resolution which was 1024 x 768 just like normal, and set at 96 dpi. Great. So it must be something with those fonts themselves.

Okay, I did the unthinkable - and I went back on my Windows partition to see what the defaults were there. It seems my Windows was using Trebuchet & Tahoma at 8 & 10pt only. So I went back to Ubuntu to try that out - but, oh no! No ms fonts on the limited ubuntu list… Next up was to fix that problem, easily, with EasyUbuntu, which has a package geared especially towards this little issue.

Since the Tahoma font wasn’t included, I chose Verdana instead — not bad.

Font Prefs screenshot