Last week I discussed how to make the Lotus Notes email client play nice with others by exporting individual email messages as .eml files.  This week we’ll cover how to use those .eml files to import email into the Thunderbird 2 client.

I was surprised this process wasn’t more straight forward.  Thunderbird 2 stores its emails in the mbox format (or a derivative thereof) and is capable of opening emails saved in the .eml format.  For whatever reason the developers didn’t see fit to allow either directly importing .eml files or saving .eml messages to Thunderbird folders after you manually open them.  Surprising oversights that hopefully will be resolved by the Thunderbird 3 release.

The steps to work around these limitations are:

1. Go to the ImportExportTools (MboxImport enhanced) homepage and download a copy of the .xpi (current version: 1.6.0.1)
2. Open Thunderbird and select the Tools\Add-ons menu option
3. Click the Install button and select the file you .xpi file you downloaded
4. After the timeout click the Install Now followed by Restart Thunderbird buttons
5. After it restarts, navigate to the Thunderbird folder where you wish to import email.
6. Select the Tools\Import/Export in mbox/eml format\Import all eml files from a directory menu item, select the directory you used when exporting your Lotus Notes messages then click OK
   

Your email will now be visible in Thunderbird!  I’d recommend browsing through your imported messages to make sure all of your email looks OK, but there are unlikely to be any problems because Thunderbird’s eml support is more robust than that embedded within Outlook and Outlook Express.

These instructions will also work for importing .eml files exported by other programs.  See the Mozillazine knowledge base article on importing and exporting your email to find out how to import your email from other programs to Thunderbird.