Problems moving from Outlook Express to Thunderbird on my XP machine

[glnz]

Well, today I started the process of moving 13 years of emails from my Outlook Express to Thunderbird ("TB"), all on my XP machine.

I installed Thunderbird on my XP machine and had it Import all settings, folders and emails from my Outlook Express.  But then when I had TB start checking for new emails, it started downloading the same very old emails that are in the successful Import.

See my details at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1233978  and at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=3041629  .

Any thoughts?  Thanks.

Edited September 16, 2018 by glnz

[Mathwiz]

I've run into similar problems, and it's a PITA. It sounds like your emails (or at least some of them) were in two places: in the OE database on your XP machine, and also on the email server.

If all your imported emails were duplicated, then I suppose you could just start over, not import them the second time, and just let them all download from the server. That's a particularly good approach if you're using IMAP, because it will only download the message headers; it won't download the body of an email unless you click on one to view it.

Otherwise, the best thing would probably be to set OE not to retain emails on the server (Tools / Accounts / Properties / Advanced, then uncheck "Leave a copy of messages on server"). Then do a send/receive; be patient because it should send commands to the email server to delete everything, which will probably take a while. Then you can start over with Thunderbird, import everything, and they won't be on the server to download and duplicate everything.

The drawback to this approach, of course, is that you won't have a copy of your emails on the server any more.