Make sure Thunderbird is closed

In Apple Mail:
Click on the folder(s) that you want to import to Thunderbird
Click Mailbox/Export Mailbox
Select a temporary destination (e.g. “old mail files” on your desktop)

(note…on Lion, the Library isn’t visible so open a new finder window and hold down the option key while you select “Go” and “Library” will magically appear)
Go to Library –> Thunderbird –> Profiles –> nsz3ebin.default (at least it is on my computer) –> Mail –> mail.comcast.net (or whatever the desired account is) –> Inbox.sbd (if you don’t have an Inbox.sbd folder, open Thunderbird and create a new folder in your inbox (File/New/Folder) and then close Thunderbird)

For each mailbox folder that you are trying to import, drag the mbox from the Apple Mail export folder (e.g. “old mail files” on your desktop) to the Inbox.sbd folder and rename it to the folder that you are trying to import.

Open Thunderbird and your folder should show up

Repeat the drag for each mailbox.

If you have subfolders, you will have to do those individually at the same level as the main folders and then drag them into the correct folders in Thunderbird. I had to go back t Apple Mail and export all my subfolders one at a time.

Thanks for the tip.

That web site is no longer supported since October 2009, but
it says that Thunderbird extension is now available from the author at
http://nic-nac-project.org/~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html
and, indeed, it seems to be.

http://homepage.mac.com/aamann/Eudora_Mailbox_Cleaner.html

Now I thought that I have all my mail on Apple Mail it will be a breeze to export them to T-bird Mac 3.0 using the built in Mail importer. Wrong. TB does not import “On my Mac” folders which is where all my files are. So it is completely useless. It doesn’t ask you where to look in Apple Mail and makes (wrong) assumptions as to what mail you want imported.

I will spend a few more hours on it, if I can’t solve the problem I am trashing TB as a piece of junk. It could not import files from TB PC or from Apple Mail. I wanted to try both TB and Apple Mail to evaluate them before making a final choice but finding how difficult it is to work with TB regarding import/export is an evaluation in itself so far TB sucks.

Useful for ‘switchers’ like me, who are salvaging what they can from OSX and moving over to Windows 7, having the luxury of both operating systems to take advantage of this.

If you do have both systems, once you have imported you mail.app messages into OSX Thunderbird, download and install the Thunderbird add-on ImportExportTools as described above, and use it to export your messages from OSX Thunderbird to somewhere that can be accessed by Windows Thunderbird (running the same add-on). You can then import them to your Windows Thunderbird and retain the folder structure too.

I did notice that it asked for confirmation of each subfolder when importing – slightly bothersome as I imported about 40 folders, so I had to sit through the import. It also added a random (3 digit) number on the end of each folder name which I had to trawl through. And, a low percentage of messages had been reset to unread status, but that doesn’t take long to fix. Otherwise, all is well.

Good luck.

please be aware that the latest version of Thunderbird 3.0 offers the possibility to import mail.app mailboxes as a builtin functionality (go to tools->import).

I was in fact very much surprised when I could not import mail from another Thunderbird mail folder into the program by function in the program itself.
A pity, because things like that make Thunderbird a little bit too nerdy for the common user.

~(my home folder)/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/xxxx.default(this folder name has alot of numbers and letters before the “.default”, so not sure why this is..as ex shows something like: 34v5bsf4.default)/Mail/Local folders
…so I don’t know how your Local folder was in that faster-to-find area-ha..
…also re my second question in previous post, in my same path above where MY LOCAL FOLDERS is listed are the following folders, so how can I tell which of these is for which account name as they show this:
mail.comcast.net, mail.comcast-1.net, mail.comcast-2.net
..and after finding out which of the above go with which accounts, maybe then I could just drag that newly made .mbox(from mac mail folder) into one of those folders on TB instead of LOCAL folder, right or not?
Tks everyone for trying to understand what I’m having hard time of putting into words and helping me out!

Quit Thunderbird
Go to Mail
Select All messages in some folder
File>Save As>Raw Message Source
****THE MOST IMPORTANT PART==> NAME THE FILE something.MBOX *****
Save it to the desktop
Drag this file into Library/Thunderbird/Local Folders/
Open Thunderbird
Voila!!

Adding the .MBOX suffix was the missing step for me. Woo hoo!

I did all the conversion and still find that apple mail is most useful, especially in searching, which is terribly slow in tbird – but I’d appreciate to know what I’m potentially risking.

thanks
gudurn

That’s ridiculous. What do they think their potential users (on the Mac) are going to be converting FROM? I bet 90% or more of them are using Apple Mail. All my friends and colleagues use Macs, and all of them use Apple Mail, except for me (and I just switched two days ago when Mail finally freaked out on me).

I wonder how many users TB is losing because they try it, immediately discover that they “can’t” convert their existing mail archives, and then drag TB to the trash?

ImportExportTools for Thunderbird 1.0-3.0a2pre, http://www.erweiterungen.de/detail/155/

also available in English.

Works like a charm.