Import Mails from Thunderbird to Mail.app (Part II)

25. März 2007 - 12:59

Some of you know, I was trying to import e-mails from Thunderbird to Apple's own Mail.app for a friend. It's supposed to work, but it just didn't. Mail showed only one huge e-mail in each folder, and the mail itself contained all other mails.

I wrote a litte perl script to fix the files so that Mail will import them properly. And I made my solution available on this blog in case somebody else is having the same problem. See the datails about the solution in my post from February, 6th.

This week I got an E-Mail from Lars Kobbe who used my script to fix his files. He also made a Droplet out of my perl skript, which makes using it easier for those of you that don't like the command line.

Just save the Droplet on your Desktop, drag your mbox-files on it, and it will fix the files for you without any need to use a command line.

Get Lars' Droplet here ...

Informatik

Kommentare

Doug - 27. März 2007 - 15:17

That's very cool.

Anonymous - 7. April 2008 - 3:20

Thank you so much! You saved my life - well, at least my electronic record of my life in the form of e-mails.

I kept almost all of them since 1995 (when I got online) and I was quite shocked as I realized what Mail.app did to my Thunderbird profile:
Import did sometimes a good job, sometimes it crashed, sometimes it important only some part of all messages. In particular folders with several thousands of files or plenty and big attachements were only partially imported ... without any failure message.

Thanks to your script & the droplet, I was now able to keep my mails. I checked some folders carefully and others just by the number. And according to that, everything seems to be fine. Definitely a much better job than what Mail.app did when processing the Thunderbird mboxes directly.

So, thanks a lot!

John - 5. Juli 2008 - 22:45

Amazing. It is now a year and a half later, and the problem still exists. When I used Mail's Import Mailboxes... to import from Thunderbird, there were lots of small mail message files ending in .emlx, and then the last one was huge - 4.5 MB. I looked inside it with a text editor, and it contained all the remaining messages up to the present. Your hint fixed the problem for me, so I am forever indebted. But how is this not fixed by Apple and/or Mozilla after this long?

Dan - 10. Juni 2009 - 7:56

I know this was posted a while ago, but I just used the droplet tonight and it saved the remaining hairs on my head from being pulled out! Thank you!