How to Migrate Apple Mail to Thunderbird on Mac & PC?

Thunderbird already supports import from Apple Mail but we have noticed that this functionality does not work sometimes. You may also plan to migrate from Mac Apple Mail to Thunderbird (Windows version). So Mail Exporter Pro provides a more reliable way to migrate your emails from Apple Mail to Thunderbird.

Quick Wizard Based Apple Mail to Thunderbird Conversion : Run through Mail Exporter Pro wizard and remember to choose “Thunderbird/Postbox” option in dropdown selection dialog.

Export Mails to an archive compatible for Thunderbird Import : Click “Next” and create a new output folder on your desktop in folder selection dialog. Choose it as output folder and wait till the export process finishes. If you want to import it on another Mac of Windows computer then copy the output folder to your destination Machine.

Import Exported Mails to Thunderbird : Now launch Thunderbird on your target machine and follow these steps (same for Mac as well as Windows)

Step 1 : Go to Thunderbird menu “Tools >> Add-ons”. Click on the second Tab Extensions on the left pane and Search for “ImportExportTools” and click “Enter” button. It will open a new Tab from where you can add the extension to Thunderbird. After installation of this tool, please restart Thunderbird. The following figure is for illustration purpose. There may be some other version of ImportExportTools available on the web. That would also work the same.

Step 2 : Now click on “Local Folders” in folder view and right click (ctrl + click) on it. Select “New Folder…” and provide name (say Apple Mail Import) for new folder.

Step 3: Right click on your newly created folder and choose context menu option “Import/Export “Import all messages from a directory” also from its subdirectories” as show in following figure.

Step 4 : Select the output folder, which contains exported eml files from Mail Exporter Pro. Just select the folder root and don’t go deeper in folder hierarchy. Click “open”. Thunderbird starts importing your “Eml” files along with the folder hierarchy. You can monitor the import progress in Thunderbird’s status bar as shown in following figure.

Step 5 : Finish You can locate imported email in left side pane of Thunderbird. Done !