Posted on by Martin

Export from Mozilla to Oulook

Okay, so having decided that I would like to change my mail program from Mozilla to Outlook, I now find that it’s not possible to migrate my mail messages. It works fine the other way round, but apparently Mozilla developers/advocates seem offended at the very thought that anyone would want to switch away from their program, while at the same time Microsoft must think it’s beneath them to import from the lizard.

Duh.

In my last post I pointed to Joel Spolsky’s article about this very matter:

“The mature approach to strategy is not to try to force things on potential customers. If somebody isn’t even your customer yet, trying to lock them in just isn’t a good idea. When you have 100% market share, come talk to me about lock-in. Until then, if you try to lock them in now, it’s too early, and if any customer catches you in the act, you’ll just wind up locking them out. Nobody wants to switch to a product that is going to eliminate their freedom in the future.”

Email has been around for decades. Email is the only application that everyone on the internet uses. How stupid is it for two of the biggest email software developers not to be able to read each other’s files?

5 Replies to “Export from Mozilla to Oulook”

  1. Well stupid it may be, but it is not surprising or even unusual, that is just the way life is.

    Personally I think you are being done a favour as anybody who wants to move to Outlook needs serious amounts of time in a padded cell IMO:-)

    However assuming you are determined to continue with your folly consider this.

    while I’ve never used Mozilla mail the netscape.public.mozilla.mail-news thread you linked to suggested that Mozilla uses standard mbox format, which is basically compatible with many other mailers. If so there is probably a way of importing your mail into Outlook using one of the other Outlook import options.

    What import options does your Outlook have (there are so many different version of Outlook I never even tried to keep track) ?

  2. Similiar problem here…

    I have over 2 years worth of mail stored in Mozilla. Recently I was hit by the thought that if something should happen to my hard drive and mozilla, I woould like to keep that email and not be tied down to mozilla to restore my mail.

    Does anyone know of a program that can take mozilla mail and convert it to some other format? I was thinking of some HTML type of “database” with each message indexed? I can see that the “Inbox” file in mozilla has the contents of all the messages in that “folder” but my “old mail folder” is 79MB. Not many text editors up to that task, plus there no real organization there.

    If anyone has any ideas can you email me at sunpig.20.bigdave53@spamgourmet.com? I probably will forget to check this page.

    Thanks.

  3. I want to export my mail from Mozilla mail to Incredimail because Mozilla mail dont support pop server != smpt server and cant only download mail, not upload mail. Anyway I want the freedom to move my old mail from here to there. Please add a export for the next version.

  5. Now with GoogleDesktopSearch, there is a compelling reason to have a copy of emails in outlook.
    But that does not imply actually using outlook. 😉
    —

Comments are closed.