transistion to Thunderbird from SeaMonkey

[Justinh]

I may have to move soon from SeaMonkey to Firefox and Thunderbird. What are the challenges of migrating SeaMonkey mail to Thunderbird? Can I just point Thunderbird to my SeaMonkey mail boxes and it work?

Thanks.

[DanRaisch]

To some extent, yes. The following link is about moving a profile to a new computer but the same process would apply for moving between Mozilla email clients and browsers -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_ ... hunderbird
For a concise, less detailed version of the process, see this thread --
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... 5#p7251375

For an alternative approach, see tanstaafl's posts in this thread -- http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... #p14209121

[tanstaafl]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Migrate_from_ ... hunderbird doesn't seem useful anymore as Thunderbird dropped the built-in support for migrating from SeaMonkey many years ago.

A SeaMonkey profile has a lot of stuff that Thunderbird doesn't use so its a bad idea to try to reuse a copy of its profile as is. Its prefs.js file (it stored your settings) also has lots of settings that don't apply to Thunderbird. I suggest you install Thunderbird, let it automatically run the new accounts wizard, add your accounts and then use the ImportExportTools (or ImportExportToolsNG if you are using version 68.*) add-on to import the mbox files (your mail folders) from your SeaMonkey profile. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_folders describes how to install and use the ImportExportTools add-on.

I'm assuming you were either using POP accounts or you moved all of your messages to a "Local Folders" account. If you used a IMAP account there is no need to migrate its mbox files, it will fetch the messages as needed from the IMAP server.

You can copy the abook.mab (personal address book) and history.mab (collected addresses address book) files as is from your SeaMonkey profile to the Thunderbird profile, replacing the existing files. You could also export them as .csv or .ldif files and then use tools -> import -> address books to import the files. The MoreFunctionsForAddressBooks add-on lets you import other *.mab files as is, but it doesn't support version 68.* or later. So if you have more than the two default address books you need to export their contents as .csv or .ldif files .....

You will need to install new versions of your add-ons (or find a replacement add-on). Thunderbird has transitioned from XUL/XPCOM based add-ons to ones based on the WebExtension API. https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/ stores the add-ons. You can either download them from there or use the search box in tools -> add-ons to find and install them. One side effect is that there is no support for complete themes anymore as the WebExtension API removed support for them. Lightweight themes are also WebExtension based now, with about 1000 of the more popular persona automatically converted to WebExtension themes. You can also use Firefox's themes.

[Justinh]

Thanks much for the info!