"Why Do I Lose Email Messages When I Import Mailboxes from Thunderbird or Postbox to Apple Mail?"

Apple Mail uses a more restrictive standard than Thunderbird or Postbox do when looking for the start of a new message, so it simply misses many or most of them. On one attempted mailbox import, I saw the message count drop about 95%! The scary part is, if I hadn't checked the count in Postbox against the count in Mail, I might not even have realized I'd lost anything.

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, a commonly recommended solution for importing from Thunderbird to Mail, did exactly the same thing, for the exact same message count. (I ran it on Snow Leopard Server in a virtual machine.)

So, how do you import without loss? I'm going to make this very simple for you. Use Weird Kid Software's Emailchemy, a brilliant app for converting from one email format to another. In the Preferences, on the "Standard mbox" tab, select "Relaxed" for "Compliance to mbox standard when reading." I also suggest you choose "UNIX and Mac OS X: LF" for "Output Newline Characters."

Then just choose to convert your mailboxes from "Thunderbird" to "Apple Mail 1.0." On the same mailbox I mentioned above, with almost 9,000 messages, Emailchemy recognized all but three, and Apple Mail showed that same number after import. Good enough!

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