local mailboxes
Hi. I've installed TB 115.1.1 (64-bit) on my Mac OS11.7.9. I've actually used its predecessor, Eudora, since 1993, including on a virtual machine the past decade or more; but in a few weeks Eudora will no longer be accepted for use by my institution due to outdated security protocols. I've been studying online TB documentation but remain confused on multiple issues.
One of the reasons I used Eudora for so long was because I could locally store outgoing and incoming emails so as to work with them when offline (airplanes, etc.) I'd archive the two boxes twice a year, renaming them, so as to keep my primary in and out box small enough to function smoothly. Thus I have 50 or so archived in boxes across decades, and another 50 or so outboxes. I keep all but the last year's on an external drive but rely on accessing the immediate past year's archived boxes simply by reaching into Eudora's Mailbox menu and choosing one to examine.
I'm starting fresh with TB and have created Local Folders, apparently, for my Sent and In boxes; so that would seem a good start.
(1) Will I forever have just one of each, growing eternally; or, as in Eudora, can I periodically export or copy contents to an additional, createable box that I can then access at will via some TB menu option? The documentation I've read in Help regarding Global Inboxes, Unified Folders, and more have my head spinning.
(2) I do have my preceding Eudora archived boxes on my computer. They sit as "Unix Executable File" format but are read immediately by Eudora. Would I be able to point TB to those periodically to read and search them, or will those files never be readable by TB?
(3) I am willing to reformat my Eudora address book contents manually as needed for TB. But I have exported it from Eudora into several formats, including csv and Excel. Should I just import one of those into TB and see what it does, or is there an example of expected entry formatting I should observe.
(4) For my eyes, in Eudora I displayed fonts at size 22 and printed 12. No matter what I set in TB preferences, the visual result remains small (looks like size 12 to me).
That's it for now. Apologies for any denseness exhibited above!
Best,
Tony
Všetky odpovede (7)
(1) Yes, you can create as many folders as you need. You can manually create and rename folders, or you can set up an archiving folder structure that creates the folders for you. See Archived Messages for details.
(2) From the little reading that I have done, I've learnt that Eudora uses the same mbox format for its boxes, which is the same format that Thunderbird also uses, but Eudora's implementation of that format is slightly different and not the standard mbox format. This means you cannot simply point Thunderbird to the Eudora boxes. However, there are options for importing those boxes to Thunderbird, which is what I highly recommend you do. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switching-thunderbird#w_importing-from-outlook-and-eudora for details.
(3) Import the csv into Thunderbird, re-map the fields if need be, and see how it goes.
(4) It is possible to tweak font sizes. Get past the 3 issues above and we can look into customizing Thunderbird.
Many thanks for your kind reply, Stans.
(1) Part of my confusion is that the referenced Archive instructions seem to refer to Sent messages only. I don't see any clear reference to archiving Received (InBox) messages. Presuming the instructions work for archiving Sent periodically, are there instructions for archiving Received (InBox) periodically?
(2) I will study the importing-mailboxes link you provided.
(3) I imported into TB the .csv file exported from Eudora. It seems that the way I organized information within the Eudora address book is incompatible with TB, as later my typing a related alias into the "To" line of an e-mail did not generate the address. Nor did entering the imported address book, selecting the desired address, and then clicking on the "add to To" button. I then tried altering a couple of other details within my Eudora format without improving the TB results. I suspect I will have to hand-add the 2000 contacts into TB.
(4) Noted.
(5) TB is taking up an extraordinary amount of my Mac memory. 12 GB within the imap.gmail.com folder, despite my having deleted some 111,000 e-mails off of my Gmail server prior. I left those in Gmail's trash, without emptying that trash, simply because I tend not to delete unneccessarily. That said, I believe the 111,000 emails in Gmails trash are what are showing up as such number in TB's "All Mail" category, as the 3000 remaining in my current In Box would not take 12 GB (apparently is listed as 1.9GB); and there are no messages in my TB Trash. Do you concur that if I empty my Gmail server's trash of the 111,000 messages, I will likely gain back some 10GB or so?
Many thanks again for your consideration,
Tony
ajgarcia2 said
(1) Part of my confusion is that the referenced Archive instructions seem to refer to Sent messages only. I don't see any clear reference to archiving Received (InBox) messages. Presuming the instructions work for archiving Sent periodically, are there instructions for archiving Received (InBox) periodically?
You must be reading instructions from elsewhere and not the Archived Messages article I linked to. The first paragraph of that article states as follows:
Thunderbird provides the ability to archive messages - that is, to move messages from their current folder into a dedicated archive folder. This makes it easy to keep the Inbox and other folders clean.
It doesn't say anything about sent messages or the Sent folder.
ajgarcia2 said
(5) TB is taking up an extraordinary amount of my Mac memory. 12 GB within the imap.gmail.com folder, despite my having deleted some 111,000 e-mails off of my Gmail server prior. I left those in Gmail's trash, without emptying that trash, simply because I tend not to delete unneccessarily. That said, I believe the 111,000 emails in Gmails trash are what are showing up as such number in TB's "All Mail" category, as the 3000 remaining in my current In Box would not take 12 GB (apparently is listed as 1.9GB); and there are no messages in my TB Trash. Do you concur that if I empty my Gmail server's trash of the 111,000 messages, I will likely gain back some 10GB or so?
If you left those 111,000 emails in Gmail's trash, then you didn't truly delete them off of the Gmail server. Since you're using IMAP, the Trash folder in TB should contain the 111,000 messages that the Gmail Trash folder contains. Your action of trashing them in Gmail is mirrored in TB as well, because IMAP facilitates two-way sync between the server and TB. Also, Gmail's All Mail folder contains all your messages. That's the one true folder that exists in Gmail, and as the name suggests, it contains ALL your messages. The other "folders" are just labels that get assigned to messages, e.g Trash. No, if you empty Gmail's Trash, you will not gain back storage space on your Mac. In fact, you don't even have to empty the trash to regain disk space. You just need to change synchronization settings in TB from the default ones. By default, TB will download ALL messages in ALL folders IN FULL and store them on your Mac's storage to facilitate offline access. That doesn't have to be the case. You can choose specific folders that TB will download messages from in full, and also which messages should be downloaded by age. For example, you can configure TB to only download messages from Inbox and Sent, that are no more than a week old. Details about synchronization options available for IMAP accounts in TB are explained here IMAP Synchronization
Hi, Stans,
Thanks for your kind replies. I will study them further. I have made revisions to the download preferences and will observe.
Best,
Tony
You still need to manually delete existing mailbox files from the imap.gmail.com folder. Those files have no filename extension, and you should be able to tell them apart just by their huge sizes. Quit Thunderbird, delete them then relaunch Thunderbird. Alternatively, you can simply empty (delete everything from) the imap.gmail.com folder as a shortcut in case you have many subfolders. Thunderbird will recreate those files by re-downloading messages using the new download preferences. You will not lose any messages as long as they exist on the server.
Thanks, Stans! I will study.