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!