Here’s How I turned an Otherwise Overwhelming Process of Apple Mail to Thunderbird Conversion into a Breeze!
Apple Mail to Thunderbird Conversion
Converting email data can be overwhelming for common users. And frankly, I had no idea it was so, until I was faced with the job of moving thousands of my emails (and contacts and calendar entries) from Apple Mail to Thunderbird.
In my defense, since I was using both email clients in Mac OS and I knew they share a lot of commonalities and perhaps data files, I thought it wouldn’t be so unnerving.
I began with the most obvious solution I thought would be – getting MBOX files from Apple Mail and importing them to Thunderbird. To my surprise, there was no easy way to do that. Firstly, I can’t find any MBOX files already in the profile database folder of Mac Mail. What I found was EMLX files storing individual emails within each file. Those files were stored in .mbox file packages that are different from standard MBOX format. Those .mbox packages are not directly supported into Thunderbird.
Convert Apple Mail to Thunderbird
And then I moved on to other ways to archive data from Mac Mail into standard MBOX files. Again, I wasn’t happy about the fact that the process of doing so isn’t so straightforward. You can find several ways to do that online but few of them involve command line methods or various add-ons and such.
All in all, the plan to Apple Mail data to standard MBOX files proved to be a long, tiring process.
Then comes along other manual processes that don’t even involve any files. Frankly, these are still fine if you don’t have more than one folder. You can choose to sync your data to a server of any email account (provided you have the space on your servers) and then sync the same data from servers to Thunderbird.
But in my case, this wasn’t practical. And the data I wanted to move was more than 15 GB and no email service offers space equal to 15 GB or more, not in free accounts. It is also a long process that can also end with missing elements.
Apple Mail to Thunderbird Conversion Tool
Finally, coming back to the method that actually worked, I would highly recommend a professional email migration utility. In my experience filled with painstaking trials and errors, there is no other utility better than “Mail Extractor Max”.

Let me tell you why: –
- First of all, there’s no manual steps here. Forget about looking for raw files or archiving data to MBOX or using a dummy email server or anything of that sort. Just launch “Mail Extractor Max” and choose to load the data to convert directly from the profile folder of Apple Mail. I can’t express this lucidly but it was a hugely pleasant surprise after all those painful methods.
- Secondly, “Mail Extractor Max” is the only converter of this sort that does the most thorough and complete conversion possible. I was concerned about some of the imagesmy database and some email addresses in Unicode characters (Chinese characters, in my case). Happy to report that all of that was converted successfully. If you have other similar complex data fragments you don’t want to miss out or not convert into output files, “Mail Extractor Max” is what you need.
- And finally, it comes with a tech support team available through the day and night. You can get in touch anytime and ask for their help in case you need any. The support team is made up of email migration experts and very responsive. Frankly, the value of a good tech support cannot be overstated. I just had few confusions regarding a certain part of my files and they cleared up in no time.

Don’t waste time anymore than you may already have done, like me. Most ordinary converters are simply MBOX or EMLX to Thunderbird converter, but to get the data transferred professionally, you need “Mail Extractor Max” that targets the database directly and eliminates all those manual tasks.
Get the free trial setup here: https://www.mailextractormax.com/.