After importing Outlook 2003 into Thunderbird, many imported folders are empty, missing mail. I have tried Repairing the folders but no mail was recovered.
Most folders have mail but many of the imported folders are empty and should contain saved email on many topics. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I am using Windows 7 Pro and Outlook 2003 is installed on the computer using a POP mail server with three accounts set up. All folders were imported, by Thunderbird, into a folder called Outlook Import. I dragged the folders relating to my Wife's account from the Outlook Import folder into my Wife's account. 8 of these folders contain about 3,000 emails but there are 39 folders with no mail at all in them. I don't know if the folders contained emails before I moved them so, I can't say if the problem occurred during the import or during the folder move. I could try importing again but I am not sure how to go about that. I don't want to double the email in the folders that were correctly imported. Thank you very much for taking the time to help us with this problem.
All Replies (4)
Which version of TB are you importing to? TB 17 or 60 are probably the best candidates. I haven't tried it, but using MailStore to transfer Outlook mail to TB might be worth considering:
https://www.paperstreet.com/blog/how-to-switch-from-outlook-to-thunderbird-email/
Thank you for your response. I used either TB 17 or 59, I don't remember which one. Here is a screenshot showing some of the folders with no mail in them after being moved from the Outlook Import folder to my Wife's email folder.
where the mails present when the import was complete.
My guess is they were and you dragged masses of mail and folders into an IMAP account, something that is known to have issues where thousands of mails or many folder are concerned.
I don't know if all the mail was present in all the folders before I moved it. I simply dragged my wife's folders from the "Local Folders" section up to her email account in Thunderbird. She discovered the missing emails as she started going through her folders. We do NOT have an IMAP email account. It is a POP account and ALL email is downloaded from the server to our computer and it is all stored on our computer, about 3GB in three email accounts. I tried twice more to import from Outlook using TB 17 and each time had missing email. I then decided to try using MailStore to extract our mail from the Outlook 2003 file, as SFHowes had suggested. It took a couple of attempts and several hours but I think I finally have ALL our email imported into Thunderbird. We have decided to leave it in the "local folders" area. Thank you all for your suggestions. A special Thank You to SFHowes for a solution that worked when I finally tried it.