[CLUE-Tech] Migrating from Outlook Express to Thunderbird

[Dan Harris]

I have a client that I'm trying to convince to finally ditch OE in favor 
of T-bird.  But, I keep running into little snags that are deal breakers 
for them.

Here's the latest scenario:

This is a contracting firm and they have a nice organized hierarchy of 
dirs on a file server for each project that is shared amongst all the 
project managers.  Currently, using OE, they drag all messages related 
to that project into a file system folder.  Then, if that email needs to 
be accessed later, they can double-click the .eml file and it will open 
in OE and allow them to reply, etc.  The important part is that 
apparently the attachment to the email gets saved with the file, so long 
after they've deleted the email in OE, they can still double click the 
archive and view the attachments.

In Thunderbird, I've found two obstacles:

#1  The only way to save an email message to the file system is to click 
File/Save. They are willing to live with that.  But, once the email is 
saved the attachments don't get automatically saved with the message.  
So if you click File/Open Saved Message, there will be no attachment to 
the message.  Having to save all the attachments manually adds more 
steps to the procedure that they are not willing to tolerate. 

#2 Once a file is saved to a local folder, double-clicking on the 
message will open it with OE.  I was able to go into Tools/File Options 
and change the File Type association to thunderbird.exe, thinking that 
double-clicking on the message would open it in T-bird.  But alas, it 
does not.  It does nothing when double-clicking on the .eml file.

I'm trying to slowly pry them out of MS's death grip but these 
roadblocks are frustrating.  Has anyone had success making the above work?

Thanks

-Dan