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Rohkem teavet

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Exported folder names with special characters to TB. These exported correctly and were stored, but do not display in TB. Now What?

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  • Viimati vastas Matt

jonathan67
jonathan67
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Before you say, "rename the folders," please understand that has been done.

So, now there are two copies of the folders exported to TB, one that displays in TB, and one that does not. Naturally, I could simply delete the "invisible" folders from Windows Explorer (but not from within TB). The fear is that doing so will corrupt the TB database.

Yes, if necessary, it is possible to trash the entire export/import progress to date and start over, but why do this if there is a simple fix? Is there? Additionally, even if the higher level folders are deleted, do we know if the phantom folders/emails that are not displayed by TB will also be correctly deleted from within the TB database? (and BTW, trashing the entire TB database and rebuilding all the accounts within TB would be very painful).

How I got here.

(leaving out details on how MS corrupted email store with upgrade to Win11 by replacing local Office2010-Outlook with 365 and trashing my local files when I moved my email service)

Having a large archive in .pst but no direct way to import to TB, I installed MailStore Home (sure wish this was integrated into TB -- otherwise very happy).

Imported .pst files including folders/subfolders with leading "." in folder names in MailStore. Exported from MailStore to TB. Discovered missing folders. Renamed folders in MailStore by replacing leading "." with "_". (this sorts and works the same) Exported those folders from MailStore to TB. Having been working furiously in TB to clean up the mess by deleting/moving/deduplicating/etc. Discoverd that there is now one set of folders in the TB with leading "." and one set with leading "_". and many of the TB folders have been improved upon (meaning, I really don't want to throw away all the work and start over). See example in images. There are lots of these folders with 10's of thousands of emails.

Before you say, "rename the folders," please understand that has been done. So, now there are two copies of the folders exported to TB, one that displays in TB, and one that does not. Naturally, I could simply delete the "invisible" folders from Windows Explorer (but not from within TB). The fear is that doing so will corrupt the TB database. '''Yes, if necessary, it is possible to trash the entire export/import progress to date and start over, but why do this if there is a simple fix? Is there?''' Additionally, even if the higher level folders are deleted, do we know if the phantom folders/emails that are not displayed by TB will also be correctly deleted from within the TB database? (and BTW, trashing the entire TB database and rebuilding all the accounts within TB would be very painful). ------------------------------ How I got here. (leaving out details on how MS corrupted email store with upgrade to Win11 by replacing local Office2010-Outlook with 365 and trashing my local files when I moved my email service) Having a large archive in .pst but no direct way to import to TB, I installed MailStore Home (sure wish this was integrated into TB -- otherwise very happy). Imported .pst files including folders/subfolders with leading "." in folder names in MailStore. Exported from MailStore to TB. Discovered missing folders. Renamed folders in MailStore by replacing leading "." with "_". (this sorts and works the same) Exported those folders from MailStore to TB. Having been working furiously in TB to clean up the mess by deleting/moving/deduplicating/etc. Discoverd that there is now one set of folders in the TB with leading "." and one set with leading "_". and many of the TB folders have been improved upon (meaning, I really don't want to throw away all the work and start over). See example in images. There are lots of these folders with 10's of thousands of emails.
Attached screenshots

All Replies (1)

Matt
Matt
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Make sure that Thunderbird is not running and just delete the folders from the file system. you might want to also delete the foldertree.json file. Thunderbird should work it out, but deleting the folder pane cache forces a read of the file system.

Note that SDB folders only exist to hold sub folders. The actual folders are the mbox files which have no file extension at all. I expand on that here https://thunderbirdtweaks.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html