This tutorial will show you how to import Address Book, Settings and downloaded messages into Thunderbird from other e-mail clients. It will be useful when you are migrating from Outlook, Eudora mail accounts and you want to keep your setting without setting up a new Tunderbird account.

If you are visiting this page accidentally, and you are wandering why people could move over Thunderbird, here are the most important arguments:

Themes - there are 10 included into the initial installation, and there are thousands available on the web.

Thunderbird Extensions - ability to add many additional features with just few clicks.

Junk Mail filtering - the best one I think can be linked to popular external spam lists with extension and basically to prevent receiving any other messages but the good one.

Message filtering - again very well customizable providing the ability to separate the received messages under different labels.

Less security bugs - as it is open source application, it can be revised by many people and the security bugs to be covered in short time.

HTML compatibility - it will open RSS ot HTML mail in the same way as any good browser will.

So, if you decide to move over Mozilla Thunderbird, or just want to try it, please fallow the next steps.

In general the migration (it will only copy, not delete) to Thunderbird can be done with few easy steps where you will define what to be transferred.

This can be done either during the installation of the client, or if you have it already installed there is an option: Tools - Import

Then choose from where you want to import mails or settings to Thunderbird.

When you click ‘Next’ you will have a few types of import options to choose from.

If you choose ‘Address Books’ you will be able to import only the contacts from the other client.

‘Mail’ option will migrate all the mails as they are.

Settings will import the e-mail boxes settings.

In order to do complete migration over Thunderbird you have to do all tree steps. During the import you will see progress bar. For example if you import Address Books from Outlook Express, you will see this screen:

And when the migration is done there will be only one option to finish the process.

When you click ‘Finish’ all the contacts will be available under Thunderbird.

As I said, do the same with the other options to have everything migrated.