It's not often that I give a thumbs-up to a program that's as buggy as Thunderbird to Outlook Express 1.0, a.k.a. Tbird2oe (free). Why? The bugs aren't debilitating and as far as I know, it's the only program that will export your Thunderbird e-mail in its entirety to an appropriate folder structure. A program called IMAPSize also exports Thunderbird e-mail, but with that one you must process each .emf folder file individually.
Tbird2oe isn't pretty, and it has some bugs, but it's still the easiest way to export Thunderbird e-mail to Microsoft Outlook Express.
With Tbird2oe all you do (after switching the program to English from its native Czech) is point the program to the Thunderbird e-mail folder (most likely something along the lines of C:\Documents and Settings\User name\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\random name\Mail), select an output location, then press start. The program processes all your Thunderbird e-mail and places the resulting individual .eml files in appropriately named folders, albeit very slowly--it took about two hours for my 27,000 e-mails.
But you wanted to read about the bugs. When I first tried to browse for the input and output locations, only the Program Files folder was listed: I had to reselect the drive from a dropdown menu to see all the existing folders. Also, the browse feature only worked once per session--I had to restart the program to change the input or output location whenever I made a mistake.
Insects or no, this program (in conjunction with Outlook Express Eml Importer, better known as OEImporteml.exe) saved me a heap of work getting my e-mail from Thunderbird to Outlook. Did I just say Outlook? Yup, OE was only a way-stop. Outlook won't import Thunderbird files, however, it will import e-mail from Outlook Express. So if you need to migrate e-mail from Thunderbird to Outlook Express or Outlook, get out your flyswatter and download Tbird2OE.
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