This is a little more complicated, but the complications are largely due to the fact that I want to move my entire message archive to the Mac from my Linux server running Ubuntu. There are a couple of gotchas, but if you’re careful and check things ahead of time it will be surprisingly straightforward. Before you start this series of steps, you should have installed the latest (or your preferred) version of Thunderbird.
- Start Thunderbird, and create your main email account. We’re not going to download any mail yet, we just need to have Thunderbird create the directory structure for us. Close Thunderbird.
- Locate your profile directory. Most likely, it will be in Users/Library/Thunderbird. The profile directory has an automatically-generated name ending in “.default”. Change into the profile directory, and then to the Mail subdirectory. There should be a directory named “Local Folders”. We will be replacing this directory with the “Local Folders” directory from our current installation of Thunderbird, so rename it to “Local Folders Save” to make that a bit simpler.
- Copy your “Local Folders” directory to your Mac. As long as you are logged in as the user for this Thunderbird installation, place the copied directory in the Mail directory. Now, there should be a “Local Folders” and a “Local Folders Save” directory present.
- We need to delete all files with an “msf” extension. These are index files for the various mail folders you’ve creted and they are re-created when the folder is referenced. If you don’t delete them, Thunderbird will likely hang when you start it. To delete them, open a terminal window and change to the “Local Folders” directory. At the command prompt, type “find . -name ‘*.msf’ -print” to locate the files we need to delete. Now, to delete them, we will modify the command we used to locate them. At the command prompt, type “find . -name ‘*.msf’ -exec rm -f {} \;”.
- Start Thunderbird, you should see your archived email messages in the “Local Folders” directory. Now you can create any additional email accounts you need. Close Thunderbird.
- There are a couple of other files you may want to copy to simplify your migration. Your address book is in the file “abook.mab”. It should be copied to the profile directory. If you’ve marked messages as junk and you want to use this information without starting over on your Mac, copy the file “training.dat” to the profile directory. If you used message filters to put junk messages into the local Junk folder or other filters, copy the file “msgFilterRules.dat” to the “Local Folders” directory.
- I have my signature files in the profile directory, so if you copy your signature files there you can set them up by editing account settings from within Thunderbird.
All done! Thunderbird works as well on the Mac as on any other platorm, and you can move your mail including your archived messages by following this simple series of steps. I started with this howto and added my own wrinkles.
BIG HINT: If you have mail in your inbox that you want to move (and you use the POP protocol), just create a folder within “Local Folders” named myinboxsave, and copy all the messages from your inbox into this folder. This way, when you copy the Local Folders to your Mac, you will have copied your inbox messages at the same time. Just open the myinboxsave folder and copy the messages back into your inbox. Nice.