Thunderbird again

[Tim Lamb]

Trying to archive messages prior to the new box move. ctrl click is very tedious. Is there a better way?

[Jeff Gaines]

Email or news groups?

If you use IMAP for email you don't need to archive them, they will be on the server. News groups are also on the server so a clean install then collect them again.

[Paul]

That depends a lot on whether the selection criteria is "obvious".

Say my bank is spamming me, my local government official has been spamming me, and so on. Each of those messages may have an obvious sender. You would then think in terms of automation for the job.

If the emails come from "random people in my community", and the topics are gardening and carpentry, and a message comes in which is 60% gardening and 40% carpentry, it would be pretty hard to craft a regular filter on a thing like that. No individual field (subject, from) is specific enough for that job. And even if an AI did it, it might be just as arbitrary about the sorting as you would be if clicking on it and being tired when doing the job.

This tool, for example, is limited on TBird version.

Paul

[John Rumm]

If you just want to select a large block, click the first, and shift click the last...

[Tim Lamb]

In message [e-mail]>, Jeff Gaines [e-mail] writes

Mail. I'm a Demon refugee and ended up with Namesco. I can leave messages on their server but have relied on local backups.

*ctrl a* has been suggested elsewhere but not tried yet. >

[Tim Lamb]

Hmm. You know my technical limitations:-)

I delete reminder messages from banks and other routine stuff. Family news etc. E-bay/ Amazon stuff goes once the parcel has been opened.

What is left accumulates. Some of this may be important: solicitors letters/attachments etc.

I tend to do it once a year but the new box has made this more important.

[Tim Lamb]

Ah! I knew there must be a way. Thanks John.

>

[Max Demian]

Surely you just find where Thunderbird keeps all its files and copy them after closing the program? (Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\ on mine.)

[Tim Lamb]

er. I was just archiving using the TBird archive provision. Moving the stuff to the new box is a problem for another day:-)

>

[mm0fmf]

Yes, it works the same way EVERY Windows program does select/cut/copy/paste etc.

[Andy Burns]

Archiving isn't about copying the thunderbird data files, it's about moving individual messages from the normal inbox/sent folders into year and/or month specific archive folders.

[Paul]

There is Import and Export, as data movement features. These are commands inside a program. Look in your menus.

There is "Profile copying" as a sport (TBird to TBird).

However, the OP is trying to move emails from one box to another, as part of cleanup before transfer. It's a different problem, which is a step before actual movement.

Less-mature tools, don't have an Import functions. And even the programs that do support Import from third-party programs, may not have scripts for all possible programs.

Some tools have date-based archiving, where at the end of

2023, all the 2023 messages go into a "2023" box. And then when you want to read them, you work by year. This keeps your actual Inbox, at a smaller size. That policy is simple enough, it is easy to code for a programmer.

Some Microsoft programs, have used a COM interface at transfer time. The tools "talk to one another" and messages are exchanged one at a time. It does not transfer an entire box as a blob. It works at the .eml level. And it uses COM. Maybe Thunderbird could pull from Outlook Express on Windows XP that way. You would have both programs running, before configuring a transfer (transfer is done "hot").

*******

I'm sure there are more methods than this, and this is just off the top of my head.

1) Profile ------------ sneakernet ---------- Profile | | Thunderbird Thunderbird

2) Profile ------------ sneakernet ---------- Profile | \ Thunderbird suck items from profile Limited number of formats/progs \ SomeEmailProgram (Opera)

3) Industry standard format / \ Export ---/ --- Import | | Thunderbird SomeEmailProgram

4) OutlookExpress ----------- COM ----------- SomeEMailProgram (WinXP era maybe) .eml transfer

Now Turnpike, that would be a mystery only an expert could solve.

Paul

[Jeff Layman]

I don't disagree, but I have often wondered what the difference would be between an /archive/ folder and a /local/ folder with a specific name (which might be "Archive 2022", etc).

I never use the Archive folder myself, preferring local folders with names which mean something. YMMV.

[John Rumm]

"The" archive folder is just a default one thunderbird creates for auto archiving. When you tell it archive something (for example by hitting "a", it will move it that folder.

There is nothing stopping you from having it somewhere else like on local folders (where is makes good sense for IMAP accounts).

It is worth going into Message Settings... and clicking on the "Copies and Folders" entry on your email account. Change it to save where you prefer, and I normally go into the advanced options and turn on "yearly" and keep existing folder structure, to make finding stuff in future easier, and also stop any one folder growing to large (and hence slow!)

[Jeff Layman]

That's in fact what I do.

Whatever the default setting was for an archive for a particular account I left it at that. However, as I never use those archives, I might go into them to uncheck the archive setting so that the folder never appears.

What I do is save all messages to NGs in a local "Posted" folder. When it got too big (in my view) I created a "Posted 2010 - 16" subfolder, and then a 2017 - 2020 subfolder, etc, and moved all messages from those years to that subfolder. For emails I have several accounts, but /all/ emails are saved on sending to one local "Sent" folder (not the server "Sent" folder). Every few days they are moved to other local folders named with people, companies, organisations etc. Being local, they are saved on the HD, and backed up frequently.

[John Rumm]

That bit is easy.... copy the contents of:

%appdata%\Roaming\Thunderbird

to the same place on the new machine.

Install the same (ish) version of TB and run it. It will all pop up where you left off with accounts and passwords etc remembered.

[Tim Lamb]

File comes up with 83 items.

Best to wait for hands on help.

Umm. Maybe when I was younger:-)

[Paul]

echo %appdata% # you can check the environment variable contents. # Legacy commands work best in cmd.exe , as you might # not know whatever passes for a Powershell equivalent.

C:\users\username\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird Crash Reports\ Profiles\ fknwxki0.default <--- your emails are usually in the "biggest" folder inside Profiles\

potential-home-of-transplanted-profile.default

profiles.ini <=== this text file, has pointers to the profiles, so you know what relative or absolute paths need to be included, to make it work like it did before. For example, this profile.ini will have "fknwxki0.default" in it.

*******

cmd.exe thunderbird -p # This starts the Profile Manager on Thunderbird # You can add a profile to the list. You can select the profile. # Using this GUI feature, takes the place of hand-editing # profiles.ini with Notepad. After a profile is added and selected, # Thunderbird will open as usual. It will start by checking # "compatibility.ini" inside the named profile folder, and seeing what (older) # version of Thunderbird made it. If the version is the same on # both machines, there is no conversion work to do.

If you cannot find %appdata%, you can try this. %appdata% is for saving some typing (sometimes).

cmd.exe # Enter this in the Terminal window, to switch to Command Prompt parser echo %appdata% # Verify the path contents, and whether it has the word Roaming or not. cd /d %appdata%\Thunderbird # Now, bolt the path components together and see if the path exists. explorer . # This opens the File Explorer or opens a File Explorer tab. # Now you can see the place for the files and so on. Copy a folder.

Paul

[Tim Lamb]

Ok Paul. Printed off for a younger brain.

[John Rumm]

Oops my bad that should be:

%appdata%\Thunderbird

%appdata% is a environment variable that will expand out to the current users app data folder. So if you user name was "Tim", then it would normally be at:

C:\Users\Tim\AppData\Roaming\

(note that the AppData folder is normally a hidden folder[1])

to get to it, open a windows file explorer windows (hold the Windows Key and push "e")

Click in the address bar and type:

%appdata%

That will show many folders for different applications you have installed - it is where they can store their configuration data. There should be a Thunderbird folder there.

If migrating to a new machine I would just copy the whole thunderbird folder.

(If you look in the profiles folder you should see your profile - it will be called <random>.default (the random bit is different for each profile). Inside that is where you find all the config files and the actual mail folders...)

[1] One of those irritating defaults in windows - hiding folders and not showing file extensions. Changing the View Options to reverse both of those makes it much easier to find what you are looking for!