Copy Messages from Live Mail to Thunderbird

Re: Windows 11 and Thunderbird 140.0.0 (64-bit)
(July 17, 2025)

On updating this computer from Windows 10 to Windows 11 yesterday, I discovered that Windows 11 doesn't like Windows Live Mail (WLM), and won't let it contact my mail servers. I've been using WLM forever, but finding no solution, I decided to switch to something else. I tried moving to Outlook (New), but wasn't able to make that work either. So, my next choice was Mozilla's Thunderbird (MT).

I was very favorably impressed right off the bat when setting up the first of my five email accounts, with MT asking only for my name and email address, then going out to find the server, get all the setup parameters, and set them up automatically. Then it was time to transfer all my old mail, and my address book (contacts) from WLM to MT.

There are several articles currently online about how to do that, but most of them appear to be outdated, advocating the use add-ons that are apparently no longer supported by MT. I'll talk about transcribing contacts on another page.

As for transcribing email messages, there’s an add-on called “ImportExportTools NG”, which Mozilla recommends as the go-to solution. They provide instructions in a help article entitled “Switching to Thunderbird”, however the “help” is rather terse. Here’s how I did it …

1. Install the ImportExportTools extension
1. Right-click the “Settings” gear icon at the bottom left corner of the MT screen, and select “Add-ons and Themes”.
2. Enter “ImportExportTools” in the extension manager search box and touch Enter
3. Find “ImportExportTools NG” on the resulting “Add-ons” page, and click the adjacent “+ Add to Thunderbird” button.
4. If a permissions panel pops up, click “Add”.
5. Dismiss all the tabs at the top of the MT screen.
6. Click the Show Spaces Toolbar ->| arrow at the lower left corner of the MT window, then click on the Mail (Alt+1) icon at the top of the pane that opens.
7. The folder pane opens, showing your email account(s).
2. Use Windows File Explorer to locate WLM’s storage folders. The usual location is C:\Users\Administrator (username)\AppData\Local\
   Microsoft\Windows Live Mail.
1. If you don’t see “AppData”, click on “View”, enable “Hidden Items”, then close and reopen File Explorer and try again.
3. Within the "Windows Live Mail" folder, you’ll see subfolders for each of your email accounts. Within each account folder you’ll see subfolders containing the contents of your “Inbox”, “Sent Items”, etc. for that account.
4. You will use the ImportExportTools NG add-on to copy the contents of these subfolders to the corresponding MT folder, one at a time.
1. Within MT, expand the folders of your first account, and select its “Inbox”.
2. Right-click the “Inbox” folder and select “ImportExportTools NG” on the pop-up context menu, and then “Import EML Messages”, and then “All EML Messages From A Directory”.
3. The “Select a directory to search the files” window pops-up: navigate to the location of your corresponding WLM Inbox, click that, then click “Select Folder”.
4. All the messages in your WLM Inbox will be copied to your MT Inbox.
5. Repeat this process for your “Sent Items” folder, and any other folders under that account that contain messages.
6. Then, if your have additional email accounts, copy their messages from WLM to MT in the same way.

I hope you’ve found the above information helpful.