Thunderbird to Outlook Express 1.0

It's not often that we give a thumbs-up to a program that's as buggy as Thunderbird to Outlook Express (TBird2OE). But we like this free app.

Why? The bugs aren't debilitating and as far as we know, Thunderbird to Outlook Express 1.0 is the only program that will export your Thunderbird email in its entirety to an appropriate folder structure. A program called IMAPSize also exports Thunderbird email, but with that one you must process each .emf folder file individually.

With Tbird2oe all you do (after switching the program to English from its native Czech) is point the program to the Thunderbird email folder (most likely something along the lines of C:\Documents and Settings\User name\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\random name\Mail), select an output location, then press start. The program processes all your Thunderbird email and places the resulting individual .eml files in appropriately named folders, albeit very slowly - it took about two hours for our 27,000 emails.

But you wanted to read about the bugs. When we first tried to browse for the input and output locations, only the Program Files folder was listed: we had to reselect the drive from a drop-down menu to see all the existing folders. Also, the browse feature only worked once per session - we had to restart Thunderbird to Outlook Express 1.0 to change the input or output location whenever we made a mistake.