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10.4: Export Mail messages to Thunderbird, revisited
Authored by: cdjohnk on Jun 29, '06 11:27:21PM
Yes, the new mail format saves mailboxes in a *folder* with a .mbox extension. Within that folder is another folder, Messages, where each file is stored individually as an emlx file that spotlight can find and search.

You can't drop the .mbox *folder* into in to the 'Local Folders' directory in your thunderbird profile the way you could drop a .mbox *file* into your 'Local Folders' (see the comments at http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/faq#mail.app for more info). However, you can convert the .emlx files back to a .mbox file using a neat little utility at http://www.cosmicsoft.net/emlxconvert.html, and the resulting .mbox file can be dropped into thunderbird using the mozilla.org directions.

First download and start up the conversion utility. Then open up a finder window and navigate into the .mbox folder you want to import into thunderbird. Open the Messages folder, and select all of the .emlx files. Then drag and drop the files onto the list box in the utility. When the file names show up in the list, click the save mbox button. I saved mine to the default name, 'Messages', on the desktop.

Next, open up the new folder('Messages', in my case) that the utility creates. Inside that folder will be a file named 'mbox'. Change the name of this file to '[My Name Here].mbox'. The name can be anything you want, but it needs to have the .mbox extension on it. The system will prompt you, asking if you really want to add the '.mbox' extension to the name. Click 'Add' - you want to do this. The icon for the file will change to a mailbox icon.

Following the aforementioned instructions at mozilla.org, drop this new .mbox file into your thunderbird profile directory. The next time you start up thunderbird, your messages will show up.

Thanks to Cosmicsoft for this handy little utility!

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