Email Migration WinXP TB to TB/Mail OS X?

So far I am loving my MBP, everything just works (to be expected with any new notebook....but still). The one outstanding issue is exporting my email from windows and importing into OS X.

I am trying to migrate my email accounts (I have nearly 3Gb including my wife's) from Win XP Thunderbird to OS X Mail or Thunderbird. I have searched and searched for a work around uploading all the email to an external server and then downloading again.

I found this post:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=177413&highlight=export+email

which gave me hope, but everything I have tried has failed. Anyone have insight into this issue? Are there any work around's other than uploading all this email to my mail server, just to download it again?

 

So...what kind of E-mail accounts are they? Who is hosting your E-mail, and what kind of protocol are they using?

 

I've been struggling with this myself. I just got a Macbook Pro and struggled to find a way to transfer all my Windows mail from Outlook 2007. What (basically) worked for me was to first install Thunderbird on my Windows machine and let it import all the mail from Outlook. Then, install Thunderbird on your Mac and copy over the profile from your Windows machine. If you'd rather use Mac's Mail app, it has an import function from Thunderbird.

I personally just want to use Mail.app, but certain mboxes won't fully import from Thunderbird, so I'm missing a lot of mail. I have an entire folder of mail that won't import at all and I can't figure out why. Right now, I'm just using Thunderbird, but would really rather switch to Mail.app.

 

I have a POP3 account through my personal domain. (GoDaddy Hosting Service)

I tried the copy and paste of profiles, maybe I was missing files. Exactly which directories do I need to copy and which do I need to paste?

I am not at home at the moment, I did see an official Thunderbird knowledge base that listed directory which directories things were stored...but it just did not seem to work.

I will give it a whirl tonight assuming someone does not post a better answer later today

Thanks!

 

First, set up your POP E-mail account in Mail.app. That should automatically download everything you have stored on your GoDaddy E-mail account.

To import everything stored locally on the mailboxes in Thunderbird, go to Thunderbird and navigate to:

C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\Mail\

Note that you will have to enable show hidden files and folders in order to see the directory, which you can enable by going to Tools>Folder Options>View and ensuring that the Show Hidden Files and Folders radio button is selected.

Afterwards, copy the file with no extension to OS X. Then, in Mail.app, go to File>Import Mailboxes, select mbox files, and follow the wizard.

 

Good news all of my email has been successfully migrated from Windows XP Thunderbird to OS X Thunderbird and here is how.

From:
C:\Documents and Settings\<your profile name>\Application Data\Thunderbird
I copied:
\Profiles
and the profiles.ini

To:
In Finder hit my name
\<name>\Library\Thunderbird\ (note this directory did not appear until after the first time I ran Thunderbird)

Copy the ...\Profiles directory (on XP) into the ...\Thunderbird (OS X)
Copy the ...\profiles.ini file (on XP) into the ...\Thunderbird (OS X)

Everything looks great and I appreciate all of your help.