Linux – convert .dbx (outlook express) mail files to a mbox format (for thunderbird) w/o Windows

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.:

.\{2FACB608-D7C6-4C50-B8B9-9D4BF365B8C2}
.\{19D3E8E8-A574-4E5F-8405-F849BB6AF543}
.\{0123044E-AC3C-4590-8E09-12DF3AF0775F}
...
etc...

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.

1. In Thunderbird, from the menubar select Tools->Import
2. When prompted click the Mail radio button to import the messages we exported in WLM eariler, and click next
3. Select Outlook Express, and once again click next
4. Lastly select the folder containing your identity C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\ {2FACB608-D7C6-4C50-B8B9-9D4BF365B8C2}\Microsoft\Outlook Express or something close to that and click next, it should import all of the emails, it should list a summary of the mail that successfully imported, from here you can click Finish and enjoy your archives in an email folder within Thunderbird called Local Folders/Outlook Express Import

Importing Your Address Book as a CSV file

Now if you want to import the csv file, that's easy enough in Thunderbird

1. Open Thunderbird 3.
2. Click Address Book in the toolbar.
3. In the resulting Address Book window, from the menubar click Tools->Import...
4. A Import window will appear, and select the Address Books Radio button and click next.
5. Select the type of file you'd like to import (in your case it would be Text file (LDIF, .tab, .csv, .txt) and click next
6. Select the .csv file that you exported (be sure to select Comma Seperated from the list)
7. After that it's just a matter of importing the file, if it doesn't work correctly, don't panic, since you can just delete the imported address book, and try to import it all over again.

The mozillaZine article Importing folders may contain a possible answer.
It dates from July 2011, but may still pertain.

The steps it describes are the following :

1. Create a new Thunderbird profile without any installed extensions
2. Download and install the ImportExportTools extension, restart Thunderbird
3. Use the menu Tools -> ImportExportTools -> import mbox file
4. Browse to the mbox file and press the Open button. The imported inbox may have a suffix appended to its name for uniqueness.

A second possible procedure is described in the mozillaZine article Manually importing and exporting, which is basically replacing an existing inbox file with the old one. For that to work you should probably use the same version of Thunderbird that created the mbox.