297533 - make Outlook default mail client when doing import (so it would succeed)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 111019

(Thunderbird :: Migration, defect)

Description

[richard.bastin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

Error message reported by Thunderbird is: -

Unable to find mail to import. Check to make sure the mail application is
correctly installed on this machine

My outlook.pst file is stored in C:/Outlook PST.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start up Thunderbird
2. Select Import
3. Select Outlook
4. Get message described above

Actual Results:  
Same as details above.

Expected Results:  
Either automatically find my outlook.pst file, or given me an option to browse
to it and select it manually.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

Is Outlook your default mail client? We can't import from Outlook if it's not
the default mail client at the time you do the import (I believe we say that in
an error message). This is because we use MAPI to import from Outlook, and we
can't use MAPI with Outlook unless it's the default mail client...if we were
smart, we could probably figure out a way of temporarily making outlook the
default mail client for this purpose.

Comment 2

[Alex Vincent [:WeirdAl]]

One of my company's users just described this bug, on a build based on Mozilla
1.7.x.  Comment 1 also describes the workaround.  Confirming.

Comment 3

[Richard Greaney]

This business of having to have Outlook as the default mail client for this to work really needs to be changed. My company frequently converts organisations who were using Outlook over to Thunderbird as part of a major network software upgrade. This involves re-installing the OS on every machine and keeping them as clean as possible. Outlook is not installed onto the machines as it has no use since Thunderbird is our mailer of choice.

At present, there is really no straightforward way to import Outlook mail into Thunderbird in our case. The users are restricted from changing the default mail client, but the import needs to be done as the user (and not as a network administrator).  The only solution we presently have is to do all the imports as an administrator, and get thunderbird to create a whole new mail store each time. These mail stores then need to be copied into the correct directory of each user to whom they belong. All this, after messing around getting Outlook to export each user's mail store as a PST file. 

I want to make thunderbird look like the good guy in here!

Comment 4

[Przemyslaw Bialik]

Adjusting summary

Comment 5

[Dirk Schoettler]

It would be kind if the Import-wizard would at least give a hint like 
"If you want to import data from Outlook, please set it as your mail cient at System-Settings XY..."

Comment 7

[Cristian Mancilla]

This topic is not a duplicate of 111019, since 111019 refers to address books and this (297533) refers to email messages.
As for myself, I found this topic while searching for a solution to the issue. There seems to be no way out of it right now, at least for me--I've set Outlook as the default program, but Thunderbird keeps showing the message reported in the description of this topic, i.e., "Unable to find mail to import. Check to make sure the mail application is correctly installed on this machine."
Any ideas on what could be done?