Moving from Outlook Express to Thunderbird

If you don’t know, Thunderbird is a stand-alone mail client, created as a redesign of the Mozilla mail component. I’m considering switching our office from using Outlook Express to Thunderbird, mostly because keeping up on the patches for OE is a pain in the butt, and OE doesn’t have built-in spam filtering .If you need more reasons, Neil has a pile of reasons why he thinks Thunderbird is superior, I still use Outlook 2002 myself, as I use its scheduling functions quite a bit, but if I didn’t need them, I’d be using Thunderbird.

But here’s the trick: Making the move from OE to Thunderbird as seamless as possible. For this, you just need to read this step-by-step guide, and a little motivation. As the article points out, if you’re using OE because you can check your Hotmail account from it (now there’s a compelling reason to keep OE — so you can download all your Hotmail spam as well as your normal spam), Hotmail Popper will allow you to access your Hotmail e-mail from any client.

Comments

Andy says:

I use Outlook Express 6.0.
Outlook Express doesn’t have built-in spam filtering, but ther a dozen of spam filter that are install as plug-in in Outlook Express. I use Spam Bully for Outlook Express. Painless installation, very simple to use. You can get the free trial at http://www.spambully.com or read an article about spamBully at http://email.about.com/cs/oepluginreviews/gr/spambully.htm

Adam says:

That step to step guide doesn’t exist anymore…. 🙁 I can’t find any other guides either!

Matt says:

Yeah, same thing here, Adam…T-Bird’s OWN guides and tutorials leave alot to be desired…
Sure was hoping that link above would lead me somewhere…
Matt

Brian says:

The Internet Archive has a copy of this page from Nov 30, 2004.
http://web.archive.org/web/20041130093619/http://jamie.typepad.com/ontheverge/2003/08/from_outlook_ex.html
Unfortunately, the archive never includes images, just the text of the html, but the descriptions are helpful and you can still follow the step-by-step guide without the images.

Alicia says:

Well, I think you should always have up to date email backups. I used to do it manually by saving the .dbx files, until I found Outlook Express Backup Genie that does it automatically at regular times.
I choused it over other because it can work with both MS Outlook and Outlook Express
Alicia