Import Email From Mozilla Thunderbird Into Gmail

Gmail offers a great deal of space, useful search capabilities, and universal access. You can bring all this utility to your Mozilla Thunderbird email by importing it into your Gmail account.

Import Email From Mozilla Thunderbird to Gmail Using IMAP

Gmail offers IMAP access—a protocol that keeps your emails on a server but lets you see and work with them as if they were stored locally (meaning, on your device). It also turns importing email into a simple drag-and-drop action. To copy your messages from Mozilla Thunderbird to Gmail:

1. Set up Gmail as an IMAP account in Mozilla Thunderbird.

2. Open the folder containing the emails you want to import.

3. Highlight the messages you want to import. (If you want to import all messages, press Ctrl+A or Command+A to highlight all messages.)

4. Right-click one of the messages that you want to copy.

5. In the menu that pops open, select Copy To, select your Gmail address, then choose the folder you want to import them to, such as the Inbox.

6. You can open your Gmail account outside of Thunderbird to verify that your messages are where you imported them.

Why Not Just Forward Your Messages?

You can forward the messages, but this is hardly an elegant or fully functional solution. The messages will lose their original senders, and emails you've sent won't appear to have been sent by you. You'll also lose some of Gmail's useful organizational capabilities, for example, Conversation View, which groups emails on the same topic together.