Import from Outlook to Thunderbird fails.
This individual keeps a very large quantity of e-mail (30,000 to 50,000 messages). The last time I tried importing the mail, Thunderbird hung, became non-responsive and the import failed. We updated to Outlook 2013 and went about our lives. Now, the ISP moved the servers in house from Gmail, and we are having folder display issues. Thunderbird supports the new system flawlessly.
So we need to switch.
Thanks for all the help you can provide.
--Sam
All Replies (6)
perhaps you need to either break the mail into multiple PSTs or use a commercial PST to MBOX conversion tool. If you can access IMAP, import only the address book and simply connect the account as IMAP and allow the folders and mail to populate in that manner.
I agree with your solution completely. Trouble is, I really think it is a Thunderbird bug. It may not be a fixable bug, but I think it is a Thunderbird bug, and it should be triaged in Bugzilla to see if we can fix it.
Quite frankly, mbox files cannot be directly imported in Thunderbird which is pretty terrible. It should be able to import from a file, so I'm not sure importing mbox files will work.
What utility would you recommend?
by the way, she has Microsoft security essentials in case that helps.
I am guessing the import hit one of the 4Gb per folder restrictions in Thunderbird, the developers are slowly getting them all cleared up, but it is taking a long time. This is basically the same issue as PST files over certain Gb limits have (I know different version have different limits.)
As far as importing MBOX files, I recommend the import export tools. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/
Your more than welcome to file a bug, that is your choice.
Similar sounding issues getting Dad set up on a new Windows 8 machine. His old Vista machine used Windows Mail. He has maybe 30K messages spread thru multiple folders (sometimes folders in folders in folders).
First attempt with the importExport tool I chose "all subfolders" option and tried to do the entire archive in one shot. This looked like it was going to work - ran for 30 minutes importing 5-10 messages / second. Then got to message 14000 and something in one folder (which contained multiple folders) and suddenly slowed to one imported message every 20 seconds. CPU usage, disk usage, network usage all around zero as far as I could tell.
Re-started and tried importing folders one at a time. "Sent Items" had 9963 messages. Importer got to 5103 and then stalled out the same way. After I killed thunderbird, deleted all messages and tried a clean restart, it appeared to hang at the exact same count. Unfortunately I wasn't able to figure out which particular message was the apparent culprit (because I also was not able to figure out in what order the add-on imports the messages).
The largest individual file I saw was around 480MB. So the 4GB limit would not appear to be a factor at first glance.
Machine is an HP Pavilion Mini 300-030 with i# processor & 4GB ram. Thunderbird 31.6.0 downloaded from PortableApps.com. ImportExportTools 3.2.1.
At this point we're going back and splitting up the larger folders. Which I guess means we're destroying the evidence we'd need for debug. Project isn't conducive to providing useful debug data. (I live 50 miles from Dad) But I might be able to provide some backup files / folders that exhibited the same problem if someone is interested.
you can convert pst to mbox using http://www.softaken.com/pst-mailbox-converter and import mbox in thunderbird with the help of free https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/