Apple mail fails to import all messages from Thunderbird

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Level 1

15 points

Apple mail fails to import all messages from Thunderbird

Apple - or appleholics - please help me; a windows switch-over is a stake.

I talked my wife into getting a MacBook Pro to replace her old, dying, Windows XP machine. She counted on me to move her saved emails from Outlook on XP into apple mail. (Note: she's NOT connecting to an exchange server, just uses outlook to get her POP mail.)

It turns out that Apple mail doesn't import directly from Outlook - but I soon determined that Thunderbird will import from Outlook, and Apple Mail from Thunderbird. Perfect!

(NOTE: Only as an ABSOLUTE LAST RESORT am I going to suggest that she use Thunderbird as her email client on her MacBook Pro - I'm hoping for ideas to AVOID this option.)

The Outlook/Thunderbird import took a long time, but completed successfully. Sure enough, in Thunderbird I can see all her messages there. I had her do some cleanup in Thunderbird, and then I did the import into Apple Mail. It seemed to go fine...

But soon she discovered that some of the archived emails DID NOT PORT OVER. They made it into T-Bird just fine, and can still be seen there -- but even when I do a fresh import - and even if I import to Apple Mail the specific sub-folder mbox files that got skipped - certain messages just refuse to import, no matter what I do.

Any ideas?

I'm aware of LittleMachines' "Outlook2Mac" program - $10 shareware - but I have no confidence that it will succeed where this other, perfectly valid method has failed - and don't care to stake $10 on the possibility.

MacPro Quad 3.9Ghz, Mac OS X (10.6.1), 8GB memory, 23 Inch AGP display

Posted on Sep 24, 2009 10:48 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 1, 2009 12:06 AM in response to Brian Leahy1

Brain,

I used Little Machines on my transfer and that of a friend's, both occasions went perfectly. You have to select which mail subfolders you want to transfer and if you reconsider and start over you get messages that you imported before twice. So, better think before you do. This is due to the nature of Mail so that a message is not overwritten by the same message but simply copied again. Notwithstanding this (it took a lot of time to remove dual copies), it went perfect for me.
Pierre

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Answer 2

owapple

Level 1

4 points

Nov 3, 2009 7:58 AM in response to Brian Leahy1

Brian:

I talked to Apple support yesterday, and they acknowledged that there is no Apple means to export from Outlook and import to Apple Mail. I then followed your example by downloading Thunderbird and importing Outlook. So far, so good. Can you please tell me how you exported from Thunderbird? I assume I'm exporting to a file or folder from which I will import into Apple Mail.

Many thanks.

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Answer 3

Nov 19, 2009 2:07 PM in response to Brian Leahy1

I wonder if anyone has any answers to this problem? I have a similar issue. I imported all of my folders / messages from Windows Mail into Thunderbird which is installed on my Mac- no problems there. However when I import the folders / messages from Thunderbird into Mac Mail - it import all of the folders just fine - however - it only imports a single message in each folder?! I have tried importing individual folders - with the same result.

Any ideas anyone?

Thanks!

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Answer 4

rudy_v

Level 1

4 points

Dec 27, 2009 7:32 AM in response to machineage

the thunderbird import into Mac Mail is broken. don't waste your time with it until Apple fixes this.

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Answer 5

crh24

Level 3

930 points

Feb 22, 2010 3:54 AM in response to rudy_v

I had several hundred MB of messages to transfer from outlook to my iMac. At first I tried the 'Thunderbird' route and as others have discovered the function is broken in Apple Mail so I went looking.

I found a few solutions, most of which were lengthy procedures, but I did find one 'simple' solution--an expensive one--but to me it was worth it to get all of my Outlook messages into a more portable format. The app is a 'plug-in' for Outlook and is designed primarily as an independent archive mechanism for Outlook .pst files but it does have a built in function for the Outlook->Mail.app solution. It worked for me. Here is a link to the product:

http://www.techhit.com/outlook/exportimport_outlook_to_entourage_apple_macmail.html

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