After a clean install of Windows XP (SP3), I reinstalled my copy of Office 2002, and despite everything I could think of it could read my email but it wouldn't send anything. It complained about the email address, which seems spurious. This is from Sky ISP (a Google derivative) pop SSL 995, smtp SSL 465 (familiar?)
So I decided to change email clients to Thunderbird, which had been praised by others in one of my forums.
Despite everything I looked at, I could not find the tool that's supposed to convert pst files into TB. So I had to reinstall Outlook, reload my pst files and then permit TB to import the data.
Now I find that EVERY file that had any kind of formatting (HTML) is now in plain text, despite TB being set to Simple HTML. As you can appreciate this is not what I expected.
Is there any way out of this?
If not, I am quite prepared to go back to Outlook and use webmail to respond to messages if necessary. This would be a real pain, but if I can't get the formatting back, then the TB folders are useless to me. Many of the emails stored have links in them which seem to have been completely destroyed.
Help anyone?

Here is a very old fashioned way to do it!

Send all your old outlook emails to yourself (but leave a copy on your ISP server.)
Then download them all in thunderbird. Haven't tried this but have used it for a similiar process when completely stuck.
BOL
M

Nice idea, but we're talking about a LOT of emails, dating back several years! I wouldn't even like to guess how many! Into 4 figures at least!!!

Oh dear...
no real futher help, I am sure that you have looked deeper into the problem and on the Mozilla help search under:

convert outlook files to thunderbird

the forecast for successful conversion seems to be very poor. (Especially for outlook 2002! it uses ANSI)

There may be a way by 'selecting all and saving as' all the outlook files to a format like html or outlook msg format and then doing an intermediate conversion. I have not tried this but I suspect a search on google may find something. However I fear like your attempts above the loss of formatting may result.
BOL
M