Recently I changed my OS from XP to W7. I made backup of any Outlook Express messages (the dbx files and adress book as CSV). On W7 I want to import that data into Thunderbird. There is option for importing from Outlook Express, but it is looking for live application data (I can't specify directory with real files myself) and there is no Outlook Express installed on W7 so I can't just import it back to it and then into Thunderbird.
How can I import that data into Thunderbird?
Best Answer
Address Book
You can import your Outlook Express Emails directly into to Mozilla Thunderbird 3.
Make sure you import from the original identity folders that Outlook Express stores the emails in:
Outlook Express contains all of it's messages for different "identities" in a folder like this:
C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities
...within that folder will be a bunch of folders with GUID's as their folder names i.e.:
Within each of these folders is a seperate OE identity.
Note that these folders contain the groups of *.dbx files (abit a few sub-directories down) which represent the folders you see within OE when using a particular identity, thus each of these folders represents an identity.
Now when you try to import the data into Thunderbird from OE the mistake that most people make is copying these *.dbx files from their identity folder and trying to import them on their own; when what you really need to do is leave them in their specific identity directory and then import them from there into Windows Live Mail.
The best way to import the mail from Outlook Express is to keep your mail in these folders, when you import them into Thunderbird, because that way you won't miss any of the folders.
Importing Your Address Book as a CSV file
Now if you want to import the csv file, that's easy enough in Thunderbird