Move thousands of thunderbird mail to outlook.com

1

I'm trying to move my 12+ years of email to one cloud account on outlook.com for ubiquitous access and searchability. It's scattered in 10+ accounts in a Thunderbird client. About 40.000 msgs.

I've tried the usually recommended method of transferring using IMAP, but it times out after a varying number of messages. Sometimes it will do up to 800, other times 20. This way it will take me days of manually selecting a few at a time and checking they got through OK.

Can't seem to pinpoint the problem. I've tried to do the same with gmail (although I don't want to transition to gmail) and it seems to have the same issue.

Any suggestions most welcome!!

user3485763

Posted 2015-02-20T11:17:27.000

Reputation: 11

Why do you need 12 years of email from 10 accounts consolidated into one email address? You haven't mentioned where the other accounts reside (imap vs pop vs exchange), just that you have them on your local machine already. Why not sort through the useful bits and consolidate them into a mailbox or file that you could put on dropbox or (AND) a flash drive? – Raystafarian – 2015-02-20T14:20:29.057

Hi

Thx for reply. The email is all downloaded to TB from a mix of POP, IMAP and exchange (using davmail) accounts.

I wanted good search capabilities. Sifting through and consolidating all the emails would take me forever, so am looking for a less involved bulk procedure.

Plus, I'm looking to cancel many of the accounts as it's just too much maintenance, but would like access to the old stuff from work etc. – user3485763 – 2015-02-20T14:59:47.283

You could throw them all into PDF with OCR. – Raystafarian – 2015-02-20T15:00:32.513

Answers

0

First thing: please note that online accounts are NOT cure-all. Please consider whether you really need to put 40000 messages online, synchronizing them on every "Send/Receive" command.

These years sometimes give feeling there are no limits in technology. Fast internet lines, huge storages etc. But it is not true and we are not there yet.

Please see what are troubles of users who are keeping all their messages online+offline. I have experience with Outlook online storage approach and I'm active Outlook+Exchange user.

Resume: I'm strongly advising against online-only storage if you have more than 1GB of data. No matter what e-mail service you are using.

I understand this is not what you wanted to hear but I couldn't help myself.

And how to transfer messages?

  1. Get full Microsoft Outlook or subscribe to Office 365 for short time.
  2. Link Outlook to your outlook.com account
  3. Migrate your messages into Outlook using Aid4Mail solution. If you put them into your mailbox, they will become available online.

I'm sorry that this solution is not free, maybe someone will come with better one.

miroxlav

Posted 2015-02-20T11:17:27.000

Reputation: 9 376

Thx! I don't have time to sort out all the old emails. I'm after well index search capabilities, which gmail and, probably, outlook should provide. TB is obnoxiously inefficient at searching a large dataset and mostly comes up with unhelpful results.

I would still keep an intermittent backup in a client, but am looking for access across devices.

I actually thought gmail and outlook.com would be able to handle it. Don't people have 10s of thousands of emails in their gmail accounts these days?

Anybody tried this for uploading: http://www.mailstore.com/en/mailstore-home-email-archiving.aspx ?

– user3485763 – 2015-02-20T14:57:26.880

In devices, usual e-mail synchronization options are 2 weeks, 1 month and 2 months. Check settings available on your device. No unlimited browsing through history... Are you sure you need 3 years old e-mails online? Will you mainly be working using web client? People have 10's thousands of e-mails online... if they are not using desktop client. AFAIK as I shown already, they can't have them across all devices anyway. I don't see big difference between old messages in your laptop (and on backups) or online. Regarding indexing – yes, desktop Outlook has great indexing. – miroxlav – 2015-02-20T16:25:34.590

Asked: 2015-02-20T11:17:27.000

Viewed: 251 times

Active: 2019-08-31T13:19:55.730