crickets?

My understanding of proton mail is all your mail will still be on their servers as their bridge acts as an IMAP server.

But this addon will probably allow you to export the mails. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools-ng/?src=ss

That is unless the bridge actively prevents the decryption of the mails that are required to export.

You can import again to local folders after you export. I suggest the mbox format be used or EML.

I have been unable to connect to Protonmail for many months, AFAIK something wrong with the Bridge app. The solution is to delete my Protonmail accounts from TBird & delete the Bridge and "clean install" again.

The emails have been deleted from the cloud server, so I MUST export or copy or move them somewhere so they are not lost when I delete the accounts. There are a lot, so I can't practically operate on each individual file, need a batch process.

Hmmm... the emails are saved in one file within my profile file. I could move it somewhere safe. But how do I either re-associate it with the new account, or with a folder I create in Local Drive? And what about the attachments? This is financial stuff so the attachments are important.

Can't use that version of import export tools with TB 60.9.1 (need to use that TB version since I need to use Theme & Font Changer to be able to increase the font used inside TB index panes)

Prevous rev 3.3.2 does work: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/#

But what useful function does it perform? Need to navigate into the profile folder & select the right sub-folder & then the mail file itself. At that point I can just COPY via the Finder. I suppose if I wanted to change the file type...

My goal is to have these emails readable from within TB. Failing that, if external to TB, indexed by header info and Readable by selecting individual emails from the index list.

I just want to copy them into the empty, new, replacement Account after I create it - but maybe that won't work after all ::

I don't quite understand the naming format within the Profile folder. I have a "main" protonmail account and five sub-accounts. But the profile folder uses a numeric name. I would GUESS that the 127.0.0.1.1 is the first created sub account. And that the shortest name (127.0.0.1) is the MAIN account ?

So if I remove everything within these folders to a safe space and the associated .msf files, I can delete those accounts, re-create them, and then what?

I guess I should replace the empty files with the saved files, but I would need to do it BEFORE I run the Bridge, since that will populate the files with the "new" mail. But it might also DELETE the old mail, since it no longer exists on the IMAP server. So... NOT what I want.

Can I just paste the old files into /profile/mail/ local folders/ ? Even though these are IMAP not POP?

Or should I rename them and paste into /profile/imap/ in order to just read them?

But the TB user interface shows the actual email address, not the actual filename of 127.x.x.x That is confusing and I wish the filename matched the name in the user interface.

copying into Local Folders resulted in a filename in the user interface, but no content. Also TB has created a .sbd file (Finder shows zero bytes) which I suppose is the file called when I click on it in the user interface.

so If I copy the contents of the 127.0.0-1.1 into the 127.0.0-1.1.sbd file... well, the emails show up in the TB user interface, but only 3 folders: all mail INBOX-1 SENT-1

out of all these:

xxx/127.0.0-1.1 xxx/127.0.0-1.1/All Mail xxx/127.0.0-1.1/All Mail.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1/Archive.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1/Archives.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1/Drafts.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1/Folders.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1/INBOX-1 xxx/127.0.0-1.1/INBOX-1.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1/INBOX.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1/Labels.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1/msgFilterRules.dat xxx/127.0.0-1.1/Sent-1 xxx/127.0.0-1.1/Sent-1.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1/Sent.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1/Spam.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1/Templates.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1/Trash.msf

xxx/127.0.0-1.1.msf

xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/All Mail xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/All Mail.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/Archive.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/Archives.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/Drafts.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/Folders.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/INBOX-1 xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/INBOX-1.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/INBOX.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/Labels.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/msgFilterRules.dat xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/Sent-1 xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/Sent-1.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/Sent.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/Spam.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/Templates.msf xxx/127.0.0-1.1.sbd/Trash.msf

So is this the (tedious) solution ?

Are the files that don't show up in the TB user interface just internal bookeeping, or IMAP that won't show up in the LOCAL FOLDER ?

What would happen if I renamed these folders first and then copied them into the /imap/ or /mail/ folder? I suppose it would screw things up since TB expects every item to have an ACCOUNT associated with it?

And from within TB, I should be able to rename 127.0.0.1 into "ProtonMail Main account old emails" etc.

Everything else in Local Folders is an .msf file. But they all are from POP mail. So is that the suffix use for POP, and .sbd for IMAP?

Can I delete the .msf now that I have copied the contents to the .sbd?

I just used the TB user interface to rename it, now there is no email in it, and the Finder shows:

xxx/Mail/Local Folders/127.0.0-1.1 Proton Sub1 xxx/Mail/Local Folders/127.0.0-1.1 Proton Sub1.msf xxx/Mail/Local Folders/127.0.0-1.1 Proton Sub1.sbd xxx/Mail/Local Folders/127.0.0-1.1.sbd

And I cannot undo the name change so I guess I need to delete the "new name" files from the Finder... quite TB trashed: /Users/hal9000/.Trash/127.0.0-1.1 Proton Sub1.sbd /Users/hal9000/.Trash/127.0.0-1.1 Proton Sub1 /Users/hal9000/.Trash/127.0.0-1.1 Proton Sub1.msf open TB Not showing anything, even though Mail/Local Folders/127.0.0-1.1.sbd still exists...

I'll trying renaming the Mail/Local Folders/127.0.0-1.1 Proton Sub1.msf back to 127.0.0-1.1 quit, restart...

Nope, still not showing up. WHY NOT !!!! So I will delete the 127.x.x. via the Finder, and start all over again copying from the /imap/ folder & pasting into mail/ local folders...

what you have in the all mail and sent folders is the only locally stored mail... everything else is fetched from the server when you select the email in the list.

presence of xxx/127.0.0-1.1/All Mail denotes a local storage file for all mail xxx/127.0.0-1.1/All Mail.msf is the index used to display the lists inside Thunderbird and these are generated when the folder is selected if not already present. But a server connection is required.

Deleting the file foldertree.json in the profile will force a rebuild of the folder cache when Thunderbird starts which is probably why you renaming is not showing up.

THe import export tools should also work on the file xxx/127.0.0-1.1/All Mail

Note the setting for local storage is in Account Settings > Synchronization and storage under message synchronization.

"Deleting the file foldertree.json in the profile will force a rebuild of the folder cache when Thunderbird starts which is probably why you renaming is not showing up."

But I DID restart, and the folder in the user interface was still empty of messages. And since I renamed via the user interface, it should work without a restart and certainly without manually deleting a file, right? Something is funky. Before I go thru all the work of moving all 6 accounts, I want to know I'm not wasting my time & that I wont end up losing the data.

And why did it seem to make up a whole new file with the new name, but fail to populate it with the data and then (fail to) delete the old-named file? Seems like a convoluted choice of method.

Yes, I set Synchronization to Save All Files in order to emulate POP behavior. Then I deleted them from the IMAP server.

I see that if I two finger click on a mail folder within the TB user interface, the import/export app is in the menu. OTOH if I select it from the TOOLS/ dropdown, it opens the Finder. Nobody writes instructions anymore...

I have a similar problem, attempting to move an email from my yahoo/frontiermail account to a local folder, but it involves only one subfolder under Local Folders; here is the tree path:

_Commerce\_Health\_Supplements\StopAgingNow\StopAgingNow-Ads

I can move the to the folder above, I can then move it back down to a different subfolder ("SAN-Acct & Orders"), but not to "StopAgingNow-Ads", even from the subfolder.

So it isn't just an issue of moving from the Inbox of my account; the problem is the target subfolder. Any email from any location cannot be moved to this target folder... I tried repairing it, to no avail.

Interestingly, it has its own Windows subfolder, whereas the other sibling subfolder ("SAN-Acct & Orders"), which has lots of emails in it, does not exist in its own Windows subfolder.

I think that this folder used to be one level up, and I moved it down one level to its current location. That may be a key to its misbehavior.

Since "StopAgingNow-Ads" has no contents, I will delete and recreate it and see what happens.

That took care of it -- deleting the Thunderbird subfolder caused the Windows folder to disappear, recreating the Thunderbird subfolder did not result in a new Windows folder, and now moving to the Thunderbird subfolder works!