Ditching Thunderbird for Outlook

17:01.10 - Wednesday 15th August 2007   (Link to This Entry)

With the recent demise of my Sony Ericsson k610i I happened to notice that I was nearing the end of my current mobile phone contract and, handset whore that I am, I cast around for my next mobile phone over on Mobile Shop. I've been on the SE bandwagon for a while now but I am considering swallowing my pride and heading back to camp Nokia in the near future.

While this was all going on, I was getting more and more frustrated with Thunderbird's bizarre approach to sending email attachments. I don't know why, and I can't be bothered to look, but when I start a new email and hit the 'Attach File' button I get a dead window. Thunderbird just hangs on me and the resets are those ugly 'Report-to-Microsoft' things that indicate something fundamental has gone wrong.

A combination of the two made me realise that I had no easy way to get all my mobile numbers back. Since Nokias all seem to sync with Outlook, and Outlook didn't crash at the drop of a hat (AND has all the Calendar stuff built in and working) I made a decision and dug out the Outlook 2002 CD that came all those years ago with my Dell Axim. It was duly installed, updated and my email accounts added. I spent a few more minutes adding mail rules to delete the tsunami of crap that comes with having an admin@ address and I'm now snug as a bug, back in Microsoft land.

Around the same time I installed the free version of PostCast Server to allow me to send email on the move without having to reconfigure the server for new IP addresses. This in itself took a bit of doing because the damned thing really doesn't like Windows XP SP2, but what can you do - it's not like I paid anything for it.

All that remains now is to move all my email from Thunderbird to Outlook. I know there are programs to help do this but they all seem to depend on converting the mbox files to .eml format and dropping them into Outlook Express, then importing the whole mail structure into Outlook from there. I'm sure that's going to be a lot of fun.

As such, I can't actually bring myself to try it just yet. I'll hunt around the Internet for a simple converter to do the job in one step, but for now my messages can sit in Thunderbird, so I'll at least know where they are.

Update: Mail now in Outlook

In the end I figured it was going to be more of a hassle firing up Firefox every time I needed to reference a recent message, so I went ahead and - following these instructions - just moved all the messages over. Job done.