Thunderbird PC to Mac migration solution

Since moving from Eudora to Thunderbird on the PC, I've become a huge fan of the Mozilla e-mail client, so I definitely wanted to continue using it as I moved to the Mac. This proved more difficult than I expected but there's a reasonably simple solution for Thunderbird v1.x (it's untested with v2.x). Simply moving the Thunderbird profile from the PC to the Mac doesn't fly (or at least it didn't for me); Thunderbird just hangs up when it tries to access these files. Instead, the process is somewhat more granular. Here's an overview, and if anyone wants more details, feel free to contact me.

1. Install Thunderbird on your Mac.
2. Open Thunderbird, and create your main mail account. Don't download any mail yet; just create the account.
3. Copy your Thunderbird profile directory from your PC to your Mac. (In Windows 2000 and XP, the default profile locations are under "Application Data", which is a hidden folder. In Explorer (i.e. double-click My Computer) click: Tools → Folder Options → View (tab) → Show Hidden files and folders.)
4. In this folder (on your Mac) and all its subfolders, you must move any file with a ".msf" extension to the Trash. I created a little Automator workflow to do this (called "Move .msf to Trash", contained in this zip file), which you can download (Ctrl-click, Save As...). To use it, open the folder in Finder, select all the files (Command-A) and then run the Automator script. You must do this for every folder in which .msf files appear.
5. Now copy "Local Folders" to your Thunderbird Mail folder on your Mac.
6. Open Thunderbird -- you should be done!

If you have more than one mail account, create all of them in step 2 (but don't download any mail). Then you can copy your old mail files into the directory structures that Thunderbird creates upon account creation.

You can also copy over these files to preserve your settings from your PC:

• Filters -- msgFilterRules.dat (goes into your Local Folder)
• Address Book - abook,mab (goes into your profile directory)
• Junk Training - training.dat (goes into your profile directory)

Note that this procedure doesn't save all of your settings and whatnot, which necessitates a little monkeying around, but it gets the bulk of the job done. If anyone knows a more complete procedure, please let me know!

[Updated 4/20/2007 22:23 EDT: Fixed the link to the "Move .msf to Trash" workflow. Made clear that this fix applies to Thunderbird 1.x.]

Comments

[Liamwen]

Thanks for posting this. It worked first time!

One thing, I had to hunt to find my Thunderbird data files (profiles, mail accts, etc.) they are under (Your user name\library\thunderbird\profiles) Maybe that's obvious to most, but for the less Mac savy, it could save some time.

Thanks again.

[Dave]

Glad it worked for you, and thanks for the extra detail!

[Dale]

Thanks for taking the time to put this together. To remove the .msf files, try this:

Open terminal, change to the Local Folders directory.

Type "find . -name '*.msf' -print" and hit enter. You will see the files that you are about to delete.

To delete them, type "find . -name '*.msf' -exec rm -f {} \;" and hit enter. They're gone.

[Dave]

Thanks, Dale. I'm always nervous of deleting files in this fashion in Terminal because once they're gone, they're GONE, with no hope of getting 'em back! But for those more confident than I on the command line, this is a great tip. :-)

[Stephen Yeh]

I would like to transfer my Mac Thunderbird mail files to a PC Thunderbird system. I tried moving the Mail files and deleting *.msf files, but they are simply ignored by Thunderbird. Should it work as simply going from Mac to PC as it supposedly does from PC to Mac? What about third party email transfer programs? I tried using transend but couldn't get it to work.

[Dave]

Stephen, I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to that particular question. But why on Earth are you moving to a PC?!

[Andrew]

Hi Dave, your method works like a gem!! i'm just trying to download the the move.msf file to trash, but it the link doesn't seem to work. Will you be able to email me?

[Dave]

I just fixed the broken link; sorry about that! (Also e-mailed the workflow to you, Andrew.)

[Clem Dye]

I've just used the instructions here to move my Thunderbird 1.x WXP PC data to a brand new Thunderbird 2.x MAC OSX install. I only transferred the core mail files, manually deleting the .msf files along the way, and this seems to have worked fine. It was easy for me to recreate my address book - I didn't have many entries and I decided to start the junk mail training from scratch.

Thanks for putting the instructions together.

Clem

[ian]

and another Thanks. This protocol worked great moving from a relatively new PC Thunderbird to a brand new Mac running Leopard. It might be worth noting that I used a utility on my PC that extracted my mail files to a .PCV file so I could transfer them easily. I copied the .PCV file to my Mac, then re-named it as a .ZIP file, and used Mac's autoextractor to get at my mail files. A last note: I had downloaded a bunch of mail to my new Mac Thunderbird profile before I found this post, so I renamed my old Inbox file to "Archive Inbox" so the old and new Inboxes wouldn't collide, and then copied messages across. The whole thing has worked beautifully, and thanks again!

[Dave]

I'm glad this worked out so well for you, Ian, and thanks for the extra hints! :-)

[ifan]

Thanks for the tips...
I'm a mac virgin, just purchased a new black macbook yesterday and spent all weekend moving files from my old PC notebook.

I was wondering if I can migrate thousands of mails to mac.. until I bumped into this article.. and it worked very well...

again.. thanks a lot man... you rock!

[Emilio]

Yesterday I simply removed the contents from the Thunderbird directory on my father's old iBook (my brother brought him a MacBook Pro), placed there the contents of the TBird directory from my old windows pc (currently being repaired/upgrade) after removing the .msf files, started TBird and after letting it rebuild everything now it works perfectly...

It even copied the news, RSS and additional components...

[Emilio]

BTW, my next computer will probably be a Mac Mini...

[Dave]

Thanks, Emilio. Once the TB files are on a Mac, it's easy to move the profile directory around as needed. The trick is getting the files from a PC to a Mac in the first place!

We have a Mac Mini as part of our home theatre set-up and it works phenomenally well. My one concern is whether Apple intends to continue supporting/building the Mac Mini hardware at all. I suspect they intend to migrate the functionality I really care about from the Mac Mini into Apple TV.

[Nathan Phillips]

What if I already have downloaded emails?

it looks like most of the files have been created.

[Dave Cassidy]

If you have downloaded mail in your Inbox, for example, then you should simply rename that mailbox in the Thunderbird file structure to a different name, such as "Inbox-new", or rename the mailbox you're importing. Then, when all of your mail is imported into Thunderbird, simply copy the mail from "Inbox-new" to "Inbox".

Hi Dave,

Thanks for this fix - haven't quite got it working yet...

Referring to your last comment (Feb 06 08) - it won't let me rename my Inbox, its greyed out. How do I do this on a Mac?

Thanks,

Jamie

[Dave]

You're almost there, Jamie! You rename the mailbox in the OSX Finder, not in Thunderbird itself. To do so, shut down Thunderbird, click on the Finder and open a Finder window (Command-N). Now navigate to the location of your Thunderbird mailboxes, which is usually in /Library/Thunderbird/Profiles?.default/Mail. Dig around in there until you see
INBOX
INBOX.mozmsgs (a folder)

Rename these to whatever you like, such as:
ILIKECHOCOLATE
ILIKECHOCOLATE.mozmsgs

Now reopen Thunderbird. You should see a mailbox called "ILIKECHOCOLATE". You can now move you old Inbox/Inbox.mozmsgs files into your Thunderbird file structure (again, using the Finder) and all should be well.

[Jamie]

Hi again,

When I looked at the finder folder, all I could see was Inbox and Inbox.msf, no Inbox.mozmsgs.

If it helps, the version of Thunderbird I am running is version 2.0.0.9 (20071031)

Thanks again for all your help,

Jamie

[Marc Fleisher]

Once I have migrated email from the Thunderbird on the PC to Thunderbird on the Macintosh, can I then migrate to Eudora on the Macintosh? Or will I fall so in love with T'bird that I will abandon Eudora? ;)

[Dave]

Eudora is not going to be developed further and will have its code become part of the TB tree, I believe. Oh, and you'll love Thunderbird anyway! So don't worry about needing to migrate to Eudora...

[Noah]

Its possible with firefox and thunderbird to copy there profile Directories
and launch thunderbird (thunderbird -profilemanager ) point to the directory where you copied the profile and you have all your settings and mail copied.

you can also use this in dual boot and tri - ( macosX windows and linux ) make a fat32 partition and move all the profile directories there launch each with --profilemanager and setup the path to the new profile

whats great about this is messages recieved and each os will be available on each once you reboot or if this is done with firefox you bookmarks are the same on all 2-3 OS's plus this way remembers all your account settings filters etc.

[Dave]

Thanks for the tip, Noah! Certainly a bit more complex than I'd take on for myself but definitely a power-tip, to be sure!

[Karina]

I had a little trouble with it because I didn't do the sequencing as you said to...not on purpose...just because I'm that dumb. So I had to blast it out of my system and start again. As soon as I did, it worked immediately. Thank you so much!