Please help advise me on moving Mac Mail to Linux Thunderbird!
Hi all, I am a lifelong fan of Firefox but for some reason got hooked into Mac Mail many years ago and just kinda stuck there. I have often wanted to switch to Thunderbird but due to such huge amounts of email and local folders, I never felt brave enough!
Having now finally had my fill of Apple, I am moving all my computing over to Linux (Fedora). This is scary but so far so good, please note I am not a CLI wizard! :)
I have 20 years (or more) of email nicely organised in folders in Mac Mail on OSX 10.14.6 (mojave). Yes I know it's out of date now, hence the move rather than suffer one more Mac update :)
Nearly all my email is in folders "On My Mac", I like to keep all mail locally. Having been that way for 20 years and having run several businesses, websites, and a lot of personal groups and stuff, you can imagine the volume of email I have. I can't afford to get this wrong so I was hoping for some kind person to walk me through the choices of ways to do it, or refer me to a guide if there is one (I couldn't find one yet).
I fear I may be complicating matters but not only converting from Mac Mail to Thunderbird, but converting OS's as well. maybe I should break it down into two stages?
Any advice very much appreciated.
thanks
All Replies (4)
There is no "simple way" unless you buy conversion software, and personally I think you probably should if you have lots and lots of folders.
The manual process is first get the data out of mac mail. See https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mail/mlhlp1030/mac
now this is where it get messy. while Mac mail used to use the mbox file in the export, now it exports a package. This dreamhost article sort of illustrates it better than the apple documentation. https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001191406-Exporting-email-using-Mac-Mail
The only part of the package you want is the mbox file not the index.
In Thunderbird you can use the import export tools addon https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools-ng/?src=ss to import those mbox files into Thunderbird, but not the MBOX packages.
It used to be you could import an mbox files in a directory and all sub directories. It has changed on the menu to with SDB structure. So I do not know if it will still parse a whole tree like it used to if the folders were arranged that way in the file system, of it the structure not has to be the one Thunderbird uses (which is using sdb folders)
Thanks very much for replying. The email alert of your reply doesn't contain a link to the thread which is strange (and annoying!). I found it again though.
Before I try to improve my knowledge to understand the latter part of your reply, I should point out I am using OSX Mojave (pretty old now) so maybe I still have mbox files? I remember finding those years ago to move from one mac system to another. Not sure how to confirm, but will see if I can find out. Would be nice if Mojave still used those instead of the packages you mentioned.
Thanks again, really hope I can do this somehow. PS If you know of any conversions tools that work, I'd be grateful for a recommendation to see how much it will cost
Bumpety bump please
I'd be grateful for a reply here.
My version of Mac Mail is old (Mojave), I tested by exporting some local mail folders (which have nested sub folders). I got just mbox files, and the directory structure all looks correct.
Is there any chance Thunderbird will import those and preserve the structure?
I am really lost on what to do. I really want to use TB, but obviously have to get my mail over to be able to say a (long overdue) good bye to apple! :)