How do I export emails from Windows Mail on one laptop into Thunderbird on another laptop?
I have an old laptop running Windows Vista, using Windows Mail. There would be over 5000 emails in the program. I have purchased a new laptop running Windows 10 and have set up Thunderbird. How can I get all of the old emails from Windows Mail into Thunderbird on the new laptop. Incidentally, the Windows Mail has many sub folders and I want to recreate this in Thunderbird (in fact, this was the reason I went with Thunderbird as Windows 10 Mail doesn't seem very good at making sub folders).
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Is the account POP or IMAP?
That makes it easier because in an IMAP account all your emails, folders etc. are kept on the server, and a copy of them is sent to the email client. So if you connect to the account with Thunderbird, it will reproduce all the folders and emails that are on the server: and if those are the ones you have in Windows Live Mail, the job is done. A good step is to log in to your account on the server via webmail (not with an email client) to check that everything there is set up as you want it. If the old mails in WLM are not on the server (i.e. if you moved them to local folders on your old laptop) you could create a temporary folder in your IMAP account, move them from the old local folders into that folder on the server and then get them on to your new laptop via Thunderbird. You might have to do them in batches but it should work. If that's not possible for some reason the old emails can be copied across as files, but that's a more complicated procedure so I would try transferring them by IMAP first.
Thanks amanchesterman I'll give that a try. The old email program is actually Windows mail (not WLM) and is definitely set to POP so the old emails only exist on the laptop. How do I actually get the emails from the laptop back up onto the webmail server?
I found some instructions here: https://www.lmi.net/support/pop-to-imap (Windows Mail is listed alongside Outlook Express half way down the page) You'll see that you can't just convert an account from POP to IMAP -- you can't do that in any email client. You have to a) stop the POP account from downloading new mail b) set up a new account with IMAP Once you have the new account up and running you should have two sets of folders in Windows Mail: the old folders for the POP account, now disabled, and the new folders for the IMAP account. I don't know about Windows Mail but in Thunderbird you would then simply copy and paste (or drag and drop) the emails from one set of folders to another. You can do groups or blocks of emails at a time, you don't have to do them individually. You'll need to do all that in Windows Mail if you can, because that is where your old messages are stored. Once they are in your IMAP account you should be able to get them into Thunderbird on the new laptop. Remember that although you will have disabled the old POP account (i.e. your computer is no longer checking it for emails) the messages are still stored on your old laptop until you move them on to the server and thence to your new machine. So don't delete any folders until the transfer is complete.
Thanks, I'll give it a go and report back.