How do you export mail from outlook express to thunderbird?

Answer 1

I recently tried to do the same thing and did quite a bit of research and most of the "quick" solutions seem to have issues of one type or another eg: dating all emails as the day of the import, losing the attachments or even dropping the HTML code in the messages. The following worked for me and the emails were transferred to Outlook Express perfectly. It can take a bit of time if you have lots of folders and sub-folders but it was worth it! I will try to give clear instructions but if you need more help please feel free to ask!

First of all compact all folders in Thunderbird and then download and install "Smartsave" for Thunderbird. Here is the link

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2887

Once installed you can then go to the file menu and choose --> Export with Smart Save and choose a folder to save to. (Note this step at the moment is only working with messages in the Local Folders and not from IMAP, but I got around it by copying all my folders into the Local Folders Tree).

You will see a log of the save process in a popup window which at the end will tell you how many emails were copied. Once that is done open Outlook Express and highlight and drag the emails from the new saved location to wherever you want them to appear in OE. You need to create the folders in OE before you can drag the emails there.

I know this process seems long winded but at this stage it is the only one I have managed to get to work that saves all the original email info as it was.

Good luck and hope this is clear enough :)

If you have lots of folders you may need this solution that lets you keep the same folder structure without manually create folders in destination:

http://blog.nektra.com/main/2009/04/14/export-messages-and-folders-from-thunderbird-to-outlook-outlook-express/

Answer 2

I recently tried to do the same thing and did quite a bit of research and most of the "quick" solutions seem to have issues of one type or another eg: dating all emails as the day of the import, losing the attachments or even dropping the HTML code in the messages. The following worked for me and the emails were transferred to Outlook Express perfectly. It can take a bit of time if you have lots of folders and sub-folders but it was worth it! I will try to give clear instructions but if you need more help please feel free to ask!

First of all compact all folders in Thunderbird and then download and install "Smartsave" for Thunderbird. Here is the link

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2887

Once installed you can then go to the file menu and choose --> Export with Smart Save and choose a folder to save to. (Note this step at the moment is only working with messages in the Local Folders and not from IMAP, but I got around it by copying all my folders into the Local Folders Tree).

You will see a log of the save process in a popup window which at the end will tell you how many emails were copied. Once that is done open Outlook Express and highlight and drag the emails from the new saved location to wherever you want them to appear in OE. You need to create the folders in OE before you can drag the emails there.

I know this process seems long winded but at this stage it is the only one I have managed to get to work that saves all the original email info as it was.

Good luck and hope this is clear enough :)

If you have lots of folders you may need this solution that lets you keep the same folder structure without manually create folders in destination:

http://blog.nektra.com/main/2009/04/14/export-messages-and-folders-from-thunderbird-to-outlook-outlook-express/