How to transfer Netscape mail emails and address book from a broken PC to Thunderbird on a new iMac

April 2, 2009 6:42 AM

I need to transfer Netscape email addresses and emails from a broken PC to Thunderbird (to be installed) on a new iMac. How do I do it?

My wife's PC hard drive has failed. However, although the Windows portion of the drive is bad (booting Windows or accessing its components results in bad noises), I'm sure we can access the data from the drive if we put it into an external USB enclosure.

The most important thing to do is to get the Netscape mail emails and address book into the Mac so that either Mac mail or (we'll happily use) Thunderbird can use them.

Assuming that we can get this stuff onto some folder (where should we put it?) in the Mac, and we then install Thunderbird, how can we get Thunderbird to import this information?

posted by mbarryf to computers & internet (3 comments total)

InterGuru's E-Mail Address Book Conversions might help with the address book.

As for the emails, copy over the Program Files > Netscape > Users folder to the Documents folder of your wife's account on your Mac. Open up Thunderbird (for the first time) and select the Netscape option of the Import window, and just follow the prompts. Thunderbird will copy over emails to its own location.

Once you're done, you can check the results and then throw away the old Netscape folder, if everything looks good.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:10 AM on April 2, 2009

What I need to know is where do I copy the following directory from the PC:

...Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\stuff.slt

to the iMac system, so that

when I install and start Thunderbird, the Thunderbird import wizard will detect this slt information and convert it to Thunderbird address book and emails.
posted by mbarryf at 8:37 AM on April 2, 2009

I'm not sure that you'll need any conversion. I'm pretty sure both Mozilla and Firefox use a generic mbox format. When I moved my email from Windows Thunderbird to Linux Thunderbird all I did was copy the contents of the profile folder into the default profile folder that was created when I opened Firefox the first time.

I would create the email account on the iMac, then find the profile folder and copy the contents over.
posted by COD at 8:43 AM on April 2, 2009