Mozilla Thunderbird to Microsoft Outlook 2019 Conversion

Topic

I need to convert Mozilla Thunderbird to Microsoft Outlook 2019; I have many personal folders.  When I search the web all have said that the manual way is to hard and suggest that I purchase software to accomplish the conversion, I’m only going to use it once.  Is there an easy or free way to do the conversion, if not is there software that you would recommend?
Also, I need to move the contacts from Thunderbird to Outlook 2019, is there an easy or free way to accomplish this?

Edit: to remove HTML. Please use the “Text” tab in the entry box when you copy/paste.

Replies

I’m not sure if this is exactly what you are after, but they might be worth a read.

I’ve always found Heinz Tschabitscher‘s how-to’s on Lifewire.com good value:
Guide to Exporting Mail From Thunderbird;
A Command Line Approach to Exporting Mail

This one is for the address book, not the emails (I expect it ought to work in 2019 too):
How to Export Thunderbird Address Book To Outlook 2016, 2013, 2010?

I’ve not tried them, but they look feasible. Hope they give you a little hope 🙂

1 user thanked author for this post.

Elly

This would obivously depend on what you’re using for the storage and where the need comes from. There’s a free and fairly easy way to do all this if you have an account on a Microsoft Exchange or equivalent server with default permissive settings (IMAP and ActiveSync allowed) and can install per-user add-ons in local Thunderbird.

If your personal folders are all on an IMAP-capable server, or you’re moving to one (such as MS Exchange or Office 365) you can even keep using the folders from both Thunderbird and Outlook simultaneously, no additional software needed. This would be the easiest case.

Server-side sync by ActiveSync is the easiest way for contacts, but then you’ll need an add-on or two for Thunderbird. (TbSync, Exchange ActiveSync for TbSync, possibly also CategoryManager depending.) Also enables continuous concurrent access though with some sync delay on contacts changes.

If you’re moving to a somewhat locked down server with EWS still enabled, you can still go that way but it’s no longer as easy – need to install and configure DavMail (and Java if you don’t have that already) as a protocol translator. Still technically possible to keep using both Thunderbird and Outlook simultaneously.

Address book export to CSV and Outlook import from CSV is quite possible, but last time I checked there was one potential problem – Outlook doesn’t support UTF-8 mode CSV import or export, and if your contacts have non-ASCII characters in names or whatever (as in pretty much anything outside base English) in Thunderbird they’re probably in UTF-8. Exchange server “Outlook Web Access” does support UTF-8 CSV import, but if you have that you probably could just do server-side sync…

For mail conversion without server-side support, the linked approach should work, or you can use the Thunderbird ImportExportTools add-on to produce “EML” format output.

(Or – unlikely – if you only started using Thunderbird very recently and did tick the box to use Maildir format for storing mails, I’d expect you could then hunt down those directly on the disk, rename or copy to add the .eml suffix, and just drag and drop.)

(It is of course possible to run your own server on your local PC and do the server-side sync that way. Most of the time this is overkill for a simple one-time conversion, but there are certain situations…)

So, what exactly is your situation?