It might work better with TB 17, or with MailStore Home as an intermediary. See these topics:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1247226

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1202963

Thank you very much, sfhowes, for your advice and links.

I chose to use MailStore Home and managed to get all my old emails from Outlook into Thunderbird just fine.

Now... maybe I should be starting new threads for the following additional issues. (I'm new here, obviously.) I did search the help and forum for info about all of them, but I found nothing helpful.

After I imported my emails, I upgraded from TB 31.8.0 to TB 78.2.2, and I notice that I have calendar and task tabs. Ooops... I would like to import my calendar entries and tasks from Outlook. I don't see any way to do that. Calendar seems to now be integrated into the base TB... no Lightning needed... and search results seem to all be about Lightning and apply to preview versions of TB.

And... since I installed TB 78.2.2, Outlook won't start. That can't be a coincidence. Thoughts?

And... when composing emails in TB I don't have any fine control over paragraph formatting (for example "Spacing after" as in Outlook). Correct? I see no way to edit the properties of body text, paragraph, heading 1, etc.

Please let me know if I need to post each of the above separately. Thanks again.

If you can export your Outlook calendar to .ics, it can be imported on the calendar tab through Events & Tasks, Import... Press Alt if the Menu Bar is hidden. Network calendars from various providers can be added with the TbSync add-on.

I've never heard of Outlook not being able to start after TB is installed. Any error message?

Do you have the HTML message composer open, with all the formatting options, rather than the plain text composer?

Good grief, sfhowes, you're killing me with kindness. Thanks so much!

I don't know why I couldn't find that info about importing .ics files when I searched. It worked, of course.

No error message from Outlook, but I fiddled around (safe mode etc) and got it back working.

Yes, I have the HTML message composer open. What I want to be able to do is, for example, change Paragraph or Heading 4 so there's more (or less) spacing between paragraphs of that style, maybe some indentation, that sort of thing. That kind of fine-tuning, both in individual messages and in templates, doesn't seem possible. Even the things that can be changed, like text size and color... if I change those attributes, I can save the changes in a template, but then I have to go fetch the template each time... I can't just start a new email and have my changes automatically be in effect. I think.

Again, I'm so appreciative of your help...

The heading and paragraph settings can't be defined the way styles are defined in a word processor, and that's mainly because email is a means of communication where the sender cannot entirely control the display settings of the recipient, e.g. display fonts are set in Options/Language & Appearance, Advanced.

If you prefer to compose html messages in full detail, an add-on like this one may be useful.

There is also an advanced template add-on.

Thanks again. SmartTemplate4 should be useful once it's compatible with TB 78.

John 454 asked "It might be that I have Outlook installed in a non-standard location; can I point Thunderbird to that location somehow?" and I would like to know this as well. Following a change from Outlook to Thunderbird, I did an import which brought over some of my previous mails. I now realise that quite a few did not migrate over. I tried another import a couple of days ago but got the message "nothing to import" and left it at that. I have just tried again and now, after selecting "outlook" - "Mail" - "Next" the program locks up! with no indication of activity or message. I know where the Outlook backup file is but there appears to be no way for me to access it from Thunderbird. However, I can read it in Outlook. Help please.

Hi, how do i import a microsoft outlook .pst file, which I backed up from MS Outlook and saved it to a USB drive

many thanks for your help

HK