If you’ve had it with Mail.app but haven’t switched to Thunderbird because you spent so long setting up all your mailboxes and dread the thought of redoing it, MacOSXHints has some good news for you. As of last nights build, Thunderbird will let you import any mailboxes you’ve set up in Mail.app. You’ll probably want to back everything up before trying this though.
Go to your Mail.app Library
folder, usually located in your user’s Library -> Mail -> *your default account*. Make a copy of the inbox.mbox
(perhaps to the desktop), then control click on the copied inbox.mbox and select Show Package Contents. Locate the file
called “mbox” and change its name to “inbox.” Run Thunderbird, and set up an account (the same as the account in your
Mail.app).
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jonathan Greene said 4:16PM on 6-16-2005
I've tried a "few" clients... Entourage for a few years, PowerMail for about a year Thunderbird, Mozilla and of course Mail.
I like Mail - though it certainly has it's quirks...
What was the reason you felt you needed to switch and Thunderbird?
Reply
sean bonner said 4:16PM on 6-16-2005
i like mail a lot too, but my problem is the junk filters keep currupting causing the program to crash and when it resarts ALL of my messages are marked as new. It's done the same thing on a few of my friends machines as well making me that much more skeptical. then I have to spend an hour marking everything as read, and start over from scratch with the junk filtering. Mostly I like it, but that's a BIG problem.
Reply
Jonathan Greene said 4:16PM on 6-16-2005
I hear you there. I've clicked on each of my mailboxes to rebuild them many a time following a force-quit.
Perhaps Entourage for the next Office will be better. Ideally they'd use a standard mbox format, but I doubt that very much. At least with IMAP you can go back and forth pretty easily and at least see how things work before converting local mailboxes.
Reply
Don said 4:16PM on 6-16-2005
Hello,
Can someone help me restore my Thunderbirrd folders from Thunderbird EZ backup. I managed to restore my address book but that is all.
Don
Reply
AlP said 4:16PM on 6-16-2005
hi, does anyone know a way to do this?
One reason I do not like Mail.app for is its _bad_ handling of attachments. Attachments mimetyped as txt are embedded into the mail, this is very uncomfortable when sending tex-files and other txt-based stuff.
Reply
Michael H said 4:16PM on 6-16-2005
is there ANY way to set Thunderbird as the default email client when clicking on email links from Safari or any other application?
Thanks :0
Reply
Mark Patterson said 4:16PM on 6-16-2005
I just changed my default email client to TB using this: http://www.monkeyfood.com/software/moreInternet/
Reply
Eric Schwarz said 4:16PM on 6-16-2005
Michael H:
Go to Mail.app and open the preferences...There's a default mail client item there...as weird as it sounds, Apple moved those preference items from the Internet System Preference in 10.2.x and put them in Safari and Mail (default browser and default mail client)
More Internet will also do the trick.... (previous post)
Reply
Brian Futrell said 4:16PM on 6-16-2005
I'm trying Thunderbird 1.0 Official.
While the renaming of the mbox file to inbox does work with messages stored in Inbox, I had two problems with it:
1) I had to copy it to Library -> Thunderbird -> Profiles -> Default -> [random_string] -> mail -> *your mail account*/ Local Folders. If I copied it just to *your mail account*, the emails did not appear.
2) It did not copy email subfolders. I have quite a few subfolders, allowing me to sort my email by topic or mailing list. None of those messages appeared.
Reply