Thread: Revert to Outlook Express

Should you switch your regular Outlook Express email habit fora taste of Thunderbird,it's worth considering what to do if you decide you don't like it and want to switch back. Sadly, Outlook Express doesn't recognise Thunderbird's mailbox files,so you can't simply import any messages you received back into OE. There are a couple of workarounds to this problem, however. First, Mozilla recommends getting rid of any special characters you used in the names of mailbox folders.Thisistoprepare the files so they can be exported using another method.



If you only have a small number of messages in your Inbox, it's possible to select each message individually, go to the File menu and choose Save As, File.Save each email with an .eml extension and they can then be imported into Outlook Express.
If all else fails, you can still open the file with a text editor such as Notepad. There are also a number ofthird-party utilities such as mbox2emi, mailbag assistant, Aid4mail, IMAPSize,and mbx2eml that can be used to create .eml files.These files can be dragged and dropped into Outlook Express. Thunderbird's own AutoSave extension can be used to save an entire folder as individual EML files.