Merge Thunderbird Mailboxes to Combine Multiple Mozilla Profiles

How to Merge Thunderbird Mailboxes from Two Separate Mailboxes/Profile

Many email clients are there like Entourage, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail, etc that support this MBOX file-format. MBOX mailboxes consist of all mail messages from 1 single mailbox in one particular file. In Mozilla Thunderbird email client application, you can easily configure multiple emailing accounts. However, if you have multiple email accounts and many mails, then it is considered better to Merge Thunderbird Mailboxes into one file for easier management through better search and faster email retrieval by the process described below to merge Thunderbird folders.

Query to Merge Thunderbird Mailboxes

Many users frequently face issues while a user tends to combine Thunderbird Profiles. One of these users wrote this query after encountering the same issue. He said that presently he was using Mozilla Thunderbird email application wherein he had five accounts and there were a large number of email folders in his mail-client. It became rather tricky for him to search for any specific emails from all those massive number of folders due to duplicity issue. So, now the requirement was of some solution for merging MBOX mailboxes so that he could also refine his search while looking for some emails & merge Thunderbird folders.

The Need to Merge Thunderbird Folders

The need to Merge Thunderbird Mailboxes arises due to several reasons. Some of these are discussed underneath:

• Some users face this need to combine Thunderbird Profiles for speeding up the search & retrieval of some specific emails from multiple folders or multiple email accounts.
•Sometimes the requirement arises when users have to use the merged file, which is a bigger file, with other some email client like Microsoft Outlook.
•The same requirement is there when users have to remove some duplicate mails or some duplicate data so as to increase some free space on the hard disk drive, which can be done when trying to merge Thunderbird folders into 1 single folder.
•Multiple MBOX mailboxes can be managed better when merged together into one single archive file.

Manual Way for Combining Multiple Thunderbird Mailboxes

The method involves 2 steps
Step 1:  MBOX conversion
Step 2: To combine Thunderbird Profiles, as follows:

STEP ONE: Importing MBOX Emails

MBOX format and Outlook are belonging to 2 separate platforms. Considering this, MBOX conversion is an intricate task not suggested to be done manually being a lengthy and impractical process in any real-world scenario. Using some good MBOX conversion tool is recommended for converting MBOX format to Microsoft Outlook.After which we can easily merge Thunderbird folders

STEP TWO: Merge Thunderbird Mailboxes

After email importation in Outlook, step 2 involves to combine Thunderbird profiles . This is done when master-archive-folder is created as shown below:
• In Outlook, form new PST file, which is Master-Archive
• Click File
1. Go to Account settings
2. Then Data Files
• Browse location
• Keep new name for Master-archive-folder
• Click File
• Go to Open
• Then Outlook-Data-File
• Connecting of master-archive has to be done for all mails being imported in last step 1
• Copy content to this particular file
• Disconnecting of previous archives
• Saving of new master file is needed in the default archiving location
• This is done by Auto-Archive settings as follows
3. Click File
4. Go to Options
5. Then Advanced
6. Then AutoArchive settings
• This would help in merging MBOX mailboxes in Outlook in PST format

Another Way to Merge Thunderbird Profiles

Manual way to Merge Thunderbird Mailboxes is a taxing one on time and effort with all the risks associated with data loss as well. The process is a confusing one for novice users and users, who are not well-versed with technical terminologies, cannot really perform the process without any glitches! Thunderbird and Outlook are needed too to perform the operation. Chances of data loss cannot be ruled out. So, better alternative and an easier one for merging MBOX mailboxes is to use some high-performing commercial tool like SysTools MBOX to PST Converter

Concluding Remarks

For merging MBOX mailboxes together into 1 place, above mentioned manual approach can be used but an expert third-party solution is developed with much expertise, thus saving users’ time & effort a great deal. This blog discussed both these approaches, one of the manual method to Merge Thunderbird Mailboxes and other of the professional tool for dealing with such problem of large data in MBOX mailboxes and merge Thunderbird folders