Best Methods to Export Gmail Emails to Thunderbird Account

Gmail is one of the most widely-used email programs that store user’s data like email messages, contacts, calendars, and so forth on the cloud. However, have you ever thought what would happen to this data if your Gmail account ever gets hacked or terminated? Yes! All your email data that you thought is safe on Gmail cloud servers will get lost. To avoid any such situation, you should always store a copy of your data at your local system. One of the ways of doing so is to configure the Gmail account in your desktop-based email client application like Thunderbird. In this blog, we are going to discuss how to export Gmail to Thunderbird in an efficient manner.
Table of Content
Reasons to Import Gmail into Thunderbird
As everyone knows, Mozilla Thunderbird is one of the desktop-based email applications. This makes it easier for its users to manage and access their complete data even without network connectivity. Moreover, it also allows users to configure various accounts in a single place. Also, there are some reasons that are useful to export Gmail to Thunderbird are:
- You can easily save your Thunderbird files on machine so that you can use them as per your requirements.
- In Mozilla Thunderbird, it is not possible to destroy email messages due to any hindrance from an external source.
- Thunderbird also allows you to share your data files with other users as per requirements.
Flawless Way to Export Gmail to Thunderbird Application
The manual approach is very lengthy and time consuming to import Gmail account into Thunderbird. Thus, users must opt for a reliable third-party Gmail Account Backup Utility for Mac. It is designed to download all Gmail emails to Thunderbird without any data loss. Its simple-to-use interface helps even novice users to operate it to export Gmail emails to Thunderbird without any problem.
The best thing about this self-operated utility is that it provides full compatibility with the Mac operating system. So that, you can easily know how to import mail from Gmail to Thunderbird. Using this program, you can even apply different naming patterns to your exported file.
Advanced Features of the Automated Tool
The tool offers multiple unique features that allow you to easily download all your Gmail emails to Thunderbird account:
- Export Selected Folders: This tool can save all folders or selected folders depending on the user’s requirement. Using the Select Folders section, you can check / uncheck the folders that you want to import from Gmail to Thunderbird.
- Option to Pause & Resume: You also get an option to pause and resume the on-going process of exporting. So, you can tap on the Pause button to export Gmail to Thunderbird. Sometimes, you may want to pause the process because of Internet connectivity or any other reason. After that, you just have to enter the credentials of your account to resume the process.
- Delete Data After Exporting: The tool offers you an option to delete the Gmail data after it has been successfully exported to Thunderbird. This is an optional feature of the tool and you can enable or disable it as per your requirement. The feature helps you create more storage space in Gmail account after deleting the emails.
Steps to Use Tool to Export Gmail Emails to Thunderbird Account
First of all download the most updated version of the tool on desktop, follow the steps given below-
- Launch, run the software and provide Gmail user credentials from which you want to export emails, tap Login button.
- For the next step, choose the MBOX file format from the Export section which is supported by Thunderbird application.
- Now, apply additional filters as required like date filter, naming conventions, etc. in the General settings section.
- After that, click on the Change button to select the location path for the exported file on the desktop.
- In this step, click on Start Backup option from the bottom to start exporting emails from Gmail mailbox.
- After saving the file on the desktop, run the Thunderbird application, click on the Tools option. Then, move the mouse towards ImportExportTools NG >> Import MBOX File option from the drop-down list.
- Now, from the next dialog box, choose Import directly one or more MBOX files and hit the OK button.
- Just select the MBOX file that you have saved from above steps and click on Open button. After completing these steps all your emails will be successfully imported into Thunderbird account.
Export Gmail to Thunderbird with Manual Method
First, you have to configure Gmail account by using the Restore backed up mails from the user account. Here, we are mentioning the steps to export Gmail emails to Thunderbird account:
- Download and install Mozilla Thunderbird application on your system.
- Then, open Gmail profile and to ensure that end-users Gmail account should be extracted to another machine. After this, go to Settings and choose the Settings option.
- Now, select the Forwarding and POP/IMAP option. From the IMAP section, choose Enable IMAP and then Save Changes to import Gmail to Thunderbird.
- After that, right-click on the username in Thunderbird client and go to the Settings option.
- Next, a new dialog box appears. Click Account Actions >> Add Mail Account.
- The Mail Account Setup dialog box will pop up. Afterwards, enter the username, email address and password in the field. Press the Continue option.
- Select an IMAP (remote folders) and then click Done.
- Click the Browse option to modify the directory. Press the OK button to finish the set-up to export Gmail emails to Thunderbird.
- At last, the new email ID is displayed in the left pane. Double-click on it and select Read Messages to start viewing the messages. You can do changes as per your requirements.
Final Thoughts
These days, most of us want to use desktop-based email applications like Mozilla Thunderbird as it is a good way to keep our crucial data safe from various online threats. Thus, in this article, we have shared solutions on how to export Gmail to Thunderbird. As an outcome, the automated tool is the best method to save Gmail emails to computer and then import to Thunderbird account. The tool protects your data from any uncertainties, and helps you import your Gmail account to Thunderbird with all its data.