One of the things that's been bugging me a little since moving to Ubuntu is which email client to use. On Windows my mail client was TheBat! from Ritlabs, it serves me very well and everything is set up just as I want it, so to move from was a wrench. It struck me on Tuesday that I could try and use Wine to run TheBat! (TB). So I installed Wine using:

sudo apt-get install wine

Before setting up TB under Wine I did a Backup from TB under Windows. Then using Wine File browser I launched TB from one of my NTFS partitions. On running TB I restored the backup I'd just made under windows, again directly from an NTFS partition. This process was super quick, normally restoring a backup under Windows takes a few minutes, this was done in under a minute, fantastic for a 450Mb file! TB then ran with my mail archive and settings restored perfectly. However all of the icons on the toolbars and the tree window where black. After a bit of rooting around on Wine's website I found that an already reported bug was causing the problem. The solution was to update from .33 to .36 which I did using the instructions I found here, which solved the problem instantly.

So now I'm basically running TheBat! with all my mail under Ubuntu. Kudos to the Wine team, for a first time user it was a great experience.