For quite a while now I’ve been interested in switching from Entourage to Thunderbird for my mail client on my Mac. The difficulty has been that I store a lot of mail in folders in Entourage and could not figure out a way to move the mail to Thunderbird, since Thunderbird cannot do a direct import from Entourage. Until I figured out a way to do that, I couldn’t make the switch.

Yesterday I was doing a little Googling on the subject and ran across a weblog post describing exactly how to deal with the problem. It seems that you can take the folders in Entourage and drag them to your desktop, which turns them into mbox files. These mbox files can then be dropped into your Mail folder in your Thunderbird preferences folder and then they will show up as folders in Thunderbird. Very slick and easy!

I’ve now begun the process of switching to Thunderbird. I’ll let you all know what I think. If any of the other reviews I’ve read about it are true, then I’m sure I’m going to love it!

–Pete