Transferring Thunderbird email to iPad and iPhone

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splitcast
Posts: 1
Joined: September 11th, 2013, 1:57 pm

Transferring Thunderbird email to iPad and iPhone

Post by splitcast »

Alright, so here's the deal. I backed up email for a good friend of mine. His site's name servers were going to be pointed to a different server so he was going to lose all of his email. He has a crappy PC, an iPad and an iPhone. So I downloaded Thunderbird, I'm running the last of the 17" MBP, and set up the account as a POP3 and was able to download all of his emails from the server, to my hard drive. I was able to export all of the emails from Thunderbird to a folder on my dropbox for him to download. Here's the question....

How do I get his thunderbird emails from the folder on dropbox to his iPhone and iPad?

Does Thunderbird have a sync to iPhone/iPad function? I'd tell him to just import to Apple Mail and sync that way but he doesn't have a mac. I greatly appreciate your help! Thanks!

-Courtney
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tanstaafl
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Posts: 49647
Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm

Re: Transferring Thunderbird email to iPad and iPhone

Post by tanstaafl »

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Synchronizing_PDAs_and_phones

I think there is a version of dropbox for both the ipad and iphone but then he'd have to deal with how to import a mbox file in his email client. Mail.app (on a mac) can import mbox files but I'm not sure the Mail app can.

I think the easiest way would be to use a IMAP account as a intermediary instead since you can copy/move messages to/from a remote folder in a IMAP account (the remote folder is on the mail server) as if its a local folder. I believe many email clients for iPhone and iPads support IMAP accounts. This avoids the whole problem of converting file formats. If he doesn't have a IMAP account sign up for either a free Gmail or iCloud IMAP account .
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