Efficient Migration From Thunderbird to Outlook

The Motivation For The Transfer

Mozilla Thunderbird had a glorious past as a free alternative email client with a wealth of features able to meet the needs of the most demanding users. However, Thunderbird could never reach the same level of popularity as the Firefox browser, for instance. It has still an estimated pool of 25 million users, however, Mozilla stopped investing resources in the project in 2012 and the future of the application remains very insecure with no new versions being actively developed. Consequently, users with long-term plans and high reliance on emails sought ways to migrate to other platforms. While many have chosen web-based email services, others were attracted by the advantages of well-maintained standalone applications backed up by resourceful corporations with a larger user base, which would guarantee the long-term support of the product. With 400 million reported active users (early 2018), Microsoft Outlook is one such alternative.

Important Requirements For A Tool That Would Help You Make The Transition

Given the realities described above, many users are confronted with the challenge of how to migrate from Thunderbird to Outlook painlessly, without losing their previous emails and without having to perform a ton of manual work. Thus, a series of requirements apply to software tools built to help migrate your emails:

  • the tool must be an all-in-one solution that would help convert your emails from the MBOX format to the PST format (native for Outlook) effectively extracting EML files embedded in Thunderbird messages. No other tools should be needed to retrieve special information or to process the data;
  • an important feature would be correcting the email encoding from other operating systems (Linux, Mac OS) to Windows;
  • fixing errors in MBOX files while converting is also a key priority, otherwise the user might be left with corrupt EML files that cannot be opened;
  • an intuitive user interface – email clients have a myriad of settings which would look very unfamiliar and overwhelming to the average user. An intuitive tool would hide all those settings and would only ask you about the important ones by also explaining their meaning beforehand and guiding you through the process step by step;
  • minimal or no manual work – the tool must be able to automatically recognize all data storage locations of Thunderbird and to perform an automatic migration;
  • data safety is a top priority – emails often contain very sensitive information, so there must be certainty that no data is leaked and ideally, that no third parties have access to it;
  • pay attention to whether the program supports both the 32 and the 64-bit version of MS Outlook.

Provided everything goes well, you would only need to perform this conversion just once, however, if you need such software on a regular basis (for instance, to perform conversion for new users constantly joining your company), then you should also pay attention to the long-term pricing scheme and update policy.

Comments:

comments so far. Comments posted to EasyReaderNews.com may be reprinted in the Easy Reader print edition, which is published each Thursday.