Thunderbird is nice and fast but it has a dirty non-standard way of storing emails. For example when you delete emails they would disappear but they’re still there until you compact your folders. I was dragging an email to a folder last night and something weird happened. The folder disappeared. I looked all over and finally found it within a subfolder of another folder. Apple click and drag glitch? Not likely. When I moved the folder back all the emails in it disappeared. I freaked out for a minute but then I learned that the physical file the folder is stored in is still intact.
You see Thunderbird stores its folders in three files:
- folder.sbd
- folder.msf
- folder - extension-less
So to recover the lost contents of that folder (it’s a special folder) I deleted the file with the .msf extension, which apparently was some kind of index for the extension-less mailbox file. When I reloaded Thunderbird it reindexed the lost folder and restored the contents.
Sometimes desperation brings out the genius in us.
Still though, Thunderbird’s way of storing emails is quite redundant in my books. Why have three files if all your emails are only stored in the extension-less file. And if you add the .mbox extension to the extension-less file you can port it to other mail programs just like that.
So… out of this mess I decided to switch to the awesome Mac Mail.app that comes with my iBook. But guess what?! Thunderbird treats whitespaces and line-breaks in a chaos, so conversion was a bitch. To cut this short, the original method of converting Thunderbird mail to Mac Mail.app didn’t work for me. Everytime I tried it I’d lose a huge bunch of emails. Not good. I was getting desperate when I stumbled upon MozillaZine which then led me to the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner which was a Godsend.
The Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is a very intuitive little program. All I did was drag my Thunderbird mail storage folder and drop it on the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner icon and it ported all my emails to Mac Mail.app effortlessly and seamlessly. Andreas Amann is a genius!!
Now that I’m using Mac Mail.app I’m quite happy with the way my emails are stored. Mac Mail.app stores each individual email in their own individual files with the .emlx extension. This makes it easy to backup specific emails/folders and it also makes it indexable and searchable by Spotlight.
Apple just won another important aspect of my life, my emails. I’m lovin my iBook more and more every day and I’m thinking about selling my desktop and saving up for a Mac Mini, or an iMac G5? 
