Thunderbird to Office Migration

There are several tools out there to migrate your email from Thunderbird to PST that you can then import into Office. Many of them are pay per license. I would stay clear of the freeware version. One pay version that I am familiar with is:

http://www.thunderbirdtooutlook.com/description/

It does a decent job of exporting/importing.

Note: In the case of my imports there was a lot of malware hidden in the old Thunderbird email that my Antivirus found and quarantined as it was exporting. So I would recommend you make sure your Antivirus is online and up to date.

Importing contacts however from Thunderbird can be time consuming due to the fact that Thunderbird and Office use different headers for the categories. Once I exported from Thunderbird to a CSV file I edit it with excel and changed the headers to match what Office is expecting. That avoids manually mapping during the import process. I was then able to cut and paste the header to all the exports and import them into Office seamlessly. Here is the header I used you can cut and paste into as the first line of you CSV. hopefully they work for you:

Note: You will be overwriting the first line of the csv with this so please make a backup copy first.

First Name,Last Name,Display Name,Nickname,E-mail Address,Secondary Email,Screen Name,Business Phone,Home Phone,Fax Number,Pager Number,Mobile Phone,Home Street,Home Street 2,Home City,Home State,Home Postal Code,Home Country,Business Street,Business Street 2,Business City,Business State,Business Postal Code,Business Country,Job Title,Department,Company,Web Page 1,Web Page 2,Birth Year,Birth Month,Birth Day,Custom 1,Custom 2,Custom 3,Custom 4,Notes

Caution: If the import is done incorrectly you can import a bunch of junk into your contact list so I would recommend importing “offline” to make sure it is all good before connecting online. Worse case you wipe that local email profile and start over.

“you break it you bought it…”