How migrate Thunderbird to Mac Mail?

g_pirtle wrote:

Navigate to ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/youruserprofile/Mail/Local Folders/

Identify mailboxes you seek to use in Mail.app.

Each mailbox has three pieces to it - i.e. "inbox.sbd", "inbox.msf" and "inbox" with no extension.

Take the file with no extension, hold down the option key (so it also stays in the folder) and drag it to the desktop.

Rename with ".mbox" as file extension, for example "inbox" becomes "inbox.mbox".

Open Mail.app and select "File Import", choose "Other" and navigate to the desktop and click "Choose".

Your mailbox(es) should appear in the import window and will import into Mail.app.

But what about all the other locally-saved folders within each of the two current Thunderbird accounts?

Note that the overall structure of what I have locally in Thunderbird seems to be different from the Mac Mail paradigm -- at least it looks so to me: In Thunderbird I have for each of the two accounts not just Inbox but also a number of other folders to which I've moved local copies of messages that first appeared in the Inbox. But it seems that in Mac Mail any such named-by-me folders are at the top level of the hierarchy, common to all accounts and not within a particular account.

Also, what is involved in having my Thunderbird accounts being POP but Mac Mail as IMAP?

MlchaelLAX wrote:

murrayE wrote:

...Most of the information I've found about doing this sort of thing, including on this site, is on the order of 5 years old, and some of it even involves using the Rosetta-based Eudora Mailbox Clearn, which of course won't run under Lion.

If you need to access old email files in Eudora, you can run Eudora by installing Snow Leopard (with Rosetta) into Parallels 7 in Lion:

Full Snow Leopard installation instructions into Parallels 7 are here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1365439

Sorry, but my question has nothing whatsoever to do with using Eudora as a mail client. It's just that old information about migrating from Thunderbird to Mac Mail suggests using the Eudora Mailbox Clean utility as a means. But that's not an option now with Lion (or Mountain Lion), since the utility uses Rosetta.

g_pirtle wrote:

Have you tried importing the Thunderbird profiles using Import Mailboxes under the File menu?

Of course I saw that Import Mailboxes menu item in Mac Mail. But I didn't try it because of the several issues I raised in my original post. Nobody has actually responded directly to how to transport my current organization in Thunderbird to Mail, nor to the question of changing what were POP accounts in Thunderbird to IMAP in Mail.

g_pirtle wrote:

....Import just the local folders you want into Mail

After importing into Mail, you can find the Local Folders in the Import -> Mail folder, but once they are imported, you can drag them into sort of structure you want. You can drag the "Local Folders" folder out of "Mail" folder and put it in the same directory as the "Import" folder and then delete the Import Folder. This will make Local Folders the top directory for your imported mail from Thunderbird

I understand what you're saying, but this does not address the issue of my current accounts on Thunderbird being set up as POP yet I want to switch to IMAP under Mac Mail.

g_pirtle wrote:

POP pulls messages from a mail server and allows you to store them locally (which you are doing with Thunderbird). IMAP displays a list of messages on your mail server and will leave them on the mail server unless deleted. Setup your account in Mail using IMAP (it will display all messages still present on the mail server at the time you stop using POP in Thunderbird). Once you start using Mail, you can import all the of the locally stored messages from Thunderbird into Mail and you can store those local messages in any folder/smart mailbox structure that you want to use. Using IMAP, you can even move locally stored messages back to the mail server if you wanted to do so.

I think this is getting at the crux of the issue. I currently have only a few dozen messages in the Inbox for each of my Thunderbird POP accounts (Gmail and a university account), whereas I have thousands sitting on each associated mail server. Over the years, as new batches of messages arrived in Thunderbird's Inbox, I either deleted messages, moved them to subfolders of that Thunderbird account, or in the case of the most important or most recent ones, left them in the Thunderbird Inbox.

So how do I prevent all those thousands of messages on each server from showing up in the new IMAP Inboxes in Mac Mail, yet keep the several dozen I currently have in each account's Thunderbird Inbox in the new Inboxes in Mac Mail?

Note: the distinction between POP and IMAP you make is fuzzier than it might seem, since both my Thunderbird POP accounts are set up to leave messages on the server no matter what I do on the client end.

g_pirtle wrote:

murrayE wrote:

So how do I prevent all those thousands of messages on each server from showing up in the new IMAP Inboxes in Mac Mail, yet keep the several dozen I currently have in each account's Thunderbird Inbox in the new Inboxes in Mac Mail?

IMAP is going to show the folders and their content as they are on the mail server.

Ouch! No way to get around that?

g_pirtle wrote:

murrayE wrote: Note: the distinction between POP and IMAP you make is fuzzier than it might seem, since both my Thunderbird POP accounts are set up to leave messages on the server no matter what I do on the client end.

In my experience, most people don't know to "leave messages on the server" for POP and I shouldn't have assumed.

Do you have a screenshot of your folder list in Thunderbird?

Here's my Thunderbird mailbox structure. Note that the Local Folders are all empty and that you may ignore the comcast account for purposes of this discussion.

g_pirtle wrote:

I think I understand your issue now. You may not want to do it this way, but this is what I would do in your situation.

Mail will integrate all your Inboxes (can be turned off in preferences and it will separate them)

It will do the same for all your Sent Folders, Trash, and other standard folders

I would create two New Mailboxes in "On My Mac" and import the mailboxes from your two profiles

Move the imported mail to the proper mailbox you created "On My Mac"

You can "show" or "hide" the remaining folders that IMAP displays

This does NOT really fix your issue though. Your Inbox will show all of your messages. But you could keep your structure within the "On My Mac" folders.

OK, I think this will have to be the way to go, with the following workaround to the problem of everything still on the server popping up in Inboxes of the newly created IMAP accounts in Mac Mail:

• In Thunderbird, under each account, create a new folder, say "Current", and move the messages currently appearing in that account's Thunderbird Inbox to it;
• log in to each server and delete everything I don't want to keep there any longer; and
• in Mac Mail, just delete everything in each account's Inbox.

Does that sound like a reasonable plan?

Also, about integrating Inboxes vs. keeping them separate in Mac Mail: I don't see any setting for this in the Mail preferences. Which pane is it on -- General, Accounts, or something else -- and what is the preference called there? (Screenshot not necessary.)

Finally, thank you for all your help so far!