ElleyKitten's Journal: Migrating from Thunderbird to Outlook

A couple weeks ago, one of my coworkers was bitching about Outlook, bitching about crapware, and then her Outlook crashed and refused to open. I thought this would be a good time to introduce her to Thunderbird. She liked the idea of not using Outlook, so I installed it and it imported everything all right, and I sent her on her way.

Well, she hates Thunderbird now and decided I needed to move her back to Outlook. *sigh* Alright, I thought, that can't be too hard. She got Outlook reinstalled and running, and asked me to transfer all he emails from the past couple of weeks from TB to OL. Sure, that can't be that hard.

Thunderbird doesn't have an export function.

THUNDERBIRD DOESN'T EXPORT?

Well, that's a problem. So I scoured the extensions website looking for something that would make TB export. I found one, but all it appears to do is move the mbox file from your profile to your desktop. Since OL doesn't read mbox files, that wasn't helpful.

So I search Google. Appearently, you need IMAPsize to convert the mbox files to eml files, then you go to Outlook Express (not Outlook?) move the eml files there, then, finally, you click export and it goes to Outlook.

Alrighty then. So I set about pulling her emails from the last few weeks (TB imported them from the past 2 years, but OL was able to recover all the ones from before she got TB). Unfortunately, crazy her had spread them out amoung 80 folders. Someone really needs to explain to her what "label" and "search" are. Also unfortunately, since she's a telecommuter, I was remoteing to her computer which she had connected through dial-up. So it was *scroll* *wait* *wait* *ok, computer finally scrolled* *click on folder* *wait* *wait* *folder, are you going to open?*

It took me 2 hours to just fucking find and put together all the emails she wanted transfered. 2 fucking hours.

I hate my job.

So that's why I'm spending the rest of the day on Slashdot.

Yup

[leoPetr]

I moved my dad back to Outlook a few months back. Exactly the same process. Thunderbird to mbox to Outlook Express to Outlook. Took me some time to get it right. Meh.

You'd think Microsoft would have made it easier to migrate from Mozilla Suite to Outlook 2003. Whatever.