import Vista windows mail to thunderbird?

[Jeff]

Does anyone have an easy effective way to import everything from Windows Vista Windows Mail to Thunderbird?

I expected by now there would be an importer built in, but it seems this is not the case.

In the past I've had no trouble importing from outlook express to thunderbird. With Vista Mail with everything stored as eml files, I thought it would go smoother, but the opposite has been the case tonight. With nothing built in, I tried http://nic-nac-project.de/~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html but only got about half the messages in, many folders blank, some emails missing parts... not very smooth. I have about 50 folders I would like to move from Vista Windows Mail to Thunderbird.

http://nic-nac-project.de/~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html seems to work better if I manually recreate each folder and then import only that folder, but that feels like the long road...

Is there an easier way?

[Jeff]

Ah, I guess I can just do it in the background while I work. 100 clicks won't kill me. I suspect it's the volume of email I'm trying to move timing out somewhere, so I could probably break it into a few directories, but it might be just as easy to go one at a time to be sure I'm not missing anything. Sometimes it's fun to take a trip down memory lane and look at the mails you've kept over the years...

[Jeff]

Well, not sure that's going to work. I manually recreated the ~50 folders - the small ones work fine. But a few big ones choke. One for example has 6200 messages in it in windows mail and that same number of eml files in the actual directory. When I use the mboximport addon for thunderbird, it imports 3500 and says done...

[Jeff]

On one stubborn folder, it helped to create a new folder in windows mail, drag all the emails from the problem folder into the new folder (which worked fine in windows mail but didn't completely import to thunerbord), and then do the import (no problem then into thunderbird.)

Also, temporarily disabling avg 2011 made the process much more reliable as its real-time watch may have been responsible for the early "partial" imports. Since the individual eml files have already all been scanned by it individually, I should have done this to start.