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Importing from Eudora - Thunderbird

From MozillaZine Knowledge Base

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Automatic importing

There are two simple ways to migrate from Eudora to Thunderbird:

  • If you are starting up Thunderbird for the very first time, the Import Wizard will pop up, and you can then select the "Eudora" option to import your mail, address books, and settings.
  • Subsequent to launching Thundebird for the first time, you can also go the the "Tools" menu, select "Import...", and then individually import your mail, address books, or settings from Eudora.
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Importing Attachments

The two programs store attachments differently: Eudora detaches them from the e-mail and stores them separately as files, usually in a folder named "Attachments" or "Attach". Thunderbird keeps the attachment together with the e-mail.

When importing from Eudora, Thunderbird attempts to join the attachment back to the e-mail it came with. This can take quite a long time if there are a large number of attachments. Also, because they include the attachments, Thunderbird's mailbox files are larger than Eudora's, though that is usually harmless.

If you want to prevent Thunderbird from re-attaching the attachments, you can try to move the folder containing Eudora's attachments to a place where Thunderbird will not find it. IMPORTANT: Do not delete Eudora's attachments folder or you will lose all your attachments. Also, please note that this solution is untested; use it at your own risk.

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Using pre-0.8 versions of Thunderbird

After importing mail from Eudora, you may find that many messages contain html tags, in angle brackets. In some cases it may be a simple "<x-flowed>" at the start of the message and a corresponding tag at the end, whereas in other cases a message might start out like this: 

    <x-html>
    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
    <HTML><HEAD>
    <META content="text/html; charset=iso-2022-jp" http-equiv=Content-Type>
    <META content="MSHTML 5.00.2614.3500" name=GENERATOR>
    <STYLE></STYLE>
    </HEAD>

This bug has been fixed in more recent version of Thunderbird and Mozilla Suite. Upgrade or use the eudora2mbox-script at eudora2mbox, which does pre-processing and converting of your Eudora mailboxes rather than cleaning them up after they've been imported. See these MozillaZine Forums threads for further discussion of how to use the script [1] [2]. You can also try the script discussed in this MozillaZine Forums thread, which is designed to be run after you have imported your Eudora mail.

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Importing Eudora Mail with Eudora Rescue

Thunderbird 1.0 and onwards has improved importing of the Eudora e-mail, but it still cannot maintain the messages' status. Until this is fixed, perhaps the best method of conversion is with the use of the Eudora Rescue utility by Qwerky. See the README for instructions for using Eudora Rescue.

After you have used Eudora Rescue, you can import the mbox into Thunderbird or Mozilla Suite.

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Importing Eudora Mail with Eudora Mailbox Cleaner

Although it only runs on Mac OS X, you can use Eudora Mailbox Cleaner to import your Eudora messages from either the Mac or the Windows version of Eudora instead of using the import function built into Thunderbird. Eudora Mailbox Cleaner should be able to

  • preserve all formatting of rich text and HTML messages
  • correctly import non-ASCII (8-bit) characters
  • preserve message status flags (such as read, replied, and forwarded)
  • and re-attach attachments for received messages, unless they have been moved or deleted from the Eudora attachment folder.

Windows users who have had no luck with Windows native tools, might experience better results transferring to a Mac, converting and then transferring it back.

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