Transferring e-mails from Outlook to Thunderbird etc..

[tony sayer]

Wonder if anyone could advise please?

We have an older machine with Outlook thereon which only supports IDE drives and runs under WIN 2000 Pro, this poor old thing throws up the occasional wobbly due to a lot of duff caps thereon.

We need to transfer some existing e-mails on that machine to a new one running WIN 7 Pro with a new Intel MB which is SATA drives only not that this should make much difference!..

Now I have imported the mails from Outlook on the old machine to Thunderbird on the -old- machine and that works fine.

However can anyone advise a way of copying or export / importing these to the New WIN 7 machine which will only run Thunderbird?.

I have both machines talking to each other over a workgroup and ethernet connected and that way have transferred a lot of other files etc.

There doesn't seem to be anything on the Thunderbird support site that advises on this at all..

Anyone any ideas please?..

[Andy Burns]

Assuming there is no information in the new machine's thunderbird you want to keep, just copy the whole of the thunderbird profile folder from the old machine to the new one ...

[Roger Mills]

Several thoughts . . .

Firstly , I can't understand why you can't run Outlook under Win7 if that's what you want to do. The Office 2007 version works perfectly well on my Win7 system - and I guess that the Office 2000 version would, though I haven't tried it.

Secondly, if you've only imported your Outlook .pst file into Thunderbird on the old machine to check that it works, and haven't created a lot of new stuff in Thunderbird, why not simply import the same Outlook file into Thunderbird on the new machine?

Finally, as Andy Burns has said, Thunderbird stores its messages etc. in profile files (whose location is Op Sys dependent) - so you should be able to overwrite[1] the profiles on the new machine with the ones on the old machine which contain all your ex-Outlook stuff.

[1] Or copy the profiles from the old machine to some convenient non-default location on the new machine, and then edit the profiles.ini file to tell Thunderbird where to find them. It's all explained in the Help Files under 'Profiles'.

[Man at B&Q]

I've just switched to Thunderbird as my employer is no longer part of the M$ home use program and I have to (to be a good boy) remove Office form my home machine.

With TB you can copy the profile folder around but you will need to edit the .ini file if it ends up on a different path on the new machine. I found this somewhere in the TB help or FAQ about backing up e-mail.

I can't say I'm overly impressed with some of TBs "features". The main bugbears so far: I selected all the options to import from Outlook but it didn't import any of my address book or contacts, nor the account settings. On one user account it refuses to check for mail on start up. You have to open a folder before you can drag mail into a subfolder, whereas Outlook would open them as you hovered over them.

Like a lot of these things, it's no better or worse than the M$ equivalent, just different.

MBQ

[Andy Burns]

Depends if the O/P meant Outlook (various versions of which will run under Win7) or Outlook Express (which is not available for Win7, though Windows Live Mail is available instead)

[tony sayer]

Well the original Office disc is sodded up and theres not enough loot in the budget at the moment to go a newer copy of Office again. On this PC the user is going to get used to Open Office and Thunderbird and tough if they don't like it;!...

If I knew how to do that I'd have done it by now but if anyone knows how thats done I'd be obliged its all learning ;)...

When TB was started on the old machine it asked what to import from Outlook which of course was on the olde machine but isn't on the new one..

Yes I'm just looking at that and thanks Andy for that info:)..

Yes RTFM of course;) Just like I tell everyone!...

[Roger Mills]

Fair enough.

Yes, but I doubt whether it needed to *run* Outlook to do the conversion

- my guess it that it only needed access to Outlook's data (.pst) file. If you copied the file to the place on the new machine where Outlook would have had put it had it been installed, there is at least a fighting chance that TB could import it. But I could be wrong!

I hope you've now got it sorted one way or another!

[tony sayer]

Which I've long forgotten and now reset...

Thanks:))..

[John Rumm]

I have not tried outlook, but I know Word versions older than 2003 are a problem to get running on Vista or later.

[tony sayer]

Earlier Word versions don't seem to be a problem.

Vista is -the- problem;(..

[John Rumm]

Well indeed, but try Word 2000 on Win 7, and it gets into a fight with the system over not being able to run with admin privilege all the time. With 2003 you can get round it by doing a first "run as admin" on the first run, and then after it runs ok as a normal user.

[tony sayer]

And for everything else theres open office;-)...