How to move a large email folder to desktop to free email space
I have Charter as a provider and the emails go through them and into Thunderbird which is what I use. I only go to Charter when I need to really remove emails. I use my TBird folders all the time. One or two of them are really huge now. By default, the Charter folders are also huge now. Since I'm getting messages that my Charter account is full and won't accept new messages, I need to clean. Well....the Inbox is clean but the folders are enormous. If I delete the Charter folders, my TBird folders also disappear. How can I move a folder out of TBird and onto my desktop for history purposes. And I don't want to open every individual email, copy it and paste it in a "word" document folder since life is too short to spend a thousand hours doing this. HELP!
All Replies (4)
lets backup and grab the problem by the horns not the other bits.
I assume from your description that your charter account is an IMAP account.
Thunderbird also has a local folder as well as your charter account on the folder tree. anything stored in "local folders" is stored in Thunderbird and deleted from charter. So simply creating a folder under local folders and dragging mails there will delete them from charter and make a local copy managed by Thunderbird. Now don't be like the last three people I told to drag mail, go off drag folders and come back and complain it does not work.
Multiple mail selection can be done with the Ctrl key while selecting mail (it holds your current selection. The shift key which will allow block selections os mails between clicks. that is click shiftkey+Click selects a block. Pressing ctrl+A will select everything in the folder.
Note that moving more than a couple of hundred mails at a time can have bad results. As the move includes a round trip to the server to delete the mail and a scan or two from your anti virus the bigger your selection of mails the more likely you are to have trouble. So keep the number done at once down and let the first thing occur before you start trying to move the next lot.
The steps you outlined were not useful. I tested your suggestion: 1. Any action I take on Thunderbird, i.e., creating a folder and dropping emails into it, are duplicated on the Charter root. However, AND THIS IS IMPORTANT: 1. Deleting any email from Thunderbird whether in the folder or in the inbox DOES NOT REMOVE IT from Charter (so my usable space in the Charter root gets used up) What's worse is: 1. If I remove an Inbox message or a saved Folder message FROM THE CHARTER ROOT, IT REMOVES IT FROM THE LOCAL THUNDERBIRD FOLDERS. This is clearly a nightmare. I am not like the last people dragging mail, etc. I know how to individually delete and delete in blocks via highlighting through Thunderbird. But that DOES NOT remove/clear the Charter account. You assumed Charter is an IMAP account. Could this be my issue? Perhaps it is another form of email account? Hmmmm.
Seriously.... If you created a folder under local folders and moved mail to it it would work. The fact that you created a folder and it was duplicated on the mail server says you did not create it in local folders you created it in your charter account. If you had created it in local folders it would not have synchronized. So please do not tell me "I tested your suggestion" you did not you did something similar.
Locate the words "Local Folders" in the list of folders on the left. Click on it. Right click with your mouse and select create folder from the menu. Type in a folder name.
IS there now
Local folders You folder name
showing in the tree on the left.
BRILLIANTBRILLIANTBRILLIANTBRILLIANTBRILLIANT Creating the folder in TBird made it a stand-alone. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question/problem. Have a GREAT HOLIDAY AND NEW YEAR!!