Restore in Thunderbird the messages of one mail account only and merge two time periods of mails
Dear all,
I'm using Thunderbird 68.4.2 which manages 3 of my email accounts (let's call them A, B and C).
Today I tried to link account A to Gmail. Don't ask what happened because I don't even know what I did wrong. In short, I created the link, then I did some tests, but I was not satisfied with the Gmail interface (mainly because I couldn't synchronize the outbox). Therefore, while the entire inbox of account A was not fully synchronized with the inbox of Gmail, I decided to remove the link between account A and Gmail. Then I deleted all messages of account A from Gmail's inbox that were already copied (or just cut and past?). Unfortunately, I realized after finishing the deletions in Gmail that these emails no longer existed in the Thunderbird inbox, and obviously nether on the website of the email provider of account A.
Fortunately, I make a backup of my Thunderbird profile from time to time. Unfortunately, the last one was done 1 month ago, but I consider that the loss of this month is not a big problem for account A. However, there are emails from account B that I have received in the past month and would like to keep (Note that account B was not at all concerned by the Gmail connection problem, so I always have for it all my messages from last month and previous). So, here are my questions:
How to restore the mails of account A only from the backup of a month ago in order to not to erase the mails of account B received during the last month?
Since the link between account A and Gmail is broken, I receive new emails in Thunderbird on account A which are starting to be important. How can I keep them when restoring the backup from a month ago? In case that it is not possible to do so, I temporarily stop the synchronization between Thunderbird and the messaging provider A.
Just a hypothetical solution that I think about: suppose I restore the emails of account A only (or at worst of all accounts A, B and C) from the back-up of one month ago while avoiding synchronization with email providers A, B and C. As soon as I authorize synchronization again, will the most recent mails still contained in servers A, B and C be imported into Thunderbird? Reversely, will the emails of accounts A recovered from the backup be synchronized again with the server A? What do you think?
Thank you in advance for taking time to help me! I whish you a good end of day.
Marjorie
Izbrana rešitev
In your backup profile folder, open the Mail or ImapMail folder, if account A is POP or IMAP, respectively. Inside, there will be a subfolder named after A. Inside that folder are mbox files, files with no extension, named e.g. Inbox, Sent etc. Copy the mbox files, renamed if necessary, into the Mail/Local Folders location of the active profile, while TB is closed. To open the profile folder, Help/Troubleshooting, click Open Folder.
When you restart TB, the copied folders will appear under Local Folders, and will not interfere with the existing accounts.
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I don't think I can help in restoring certain messages ... but I also had problems connecting to my Gmail Accounts recently.
I finally fixed my Gmail login problems by following these instructions: https://www.supertechcrew.com/thunderbird-oauth2-gmail/ But I found I had to enable cookies in TB in order to make that work.
Try restoring the connection between Account A and Gmails Servers with those instructions, First before addressing the other problems.
Izbrana rešitev
In your backup profile folder, open the Mail or ImapMail folder, if account A is POP or IMAP, respectively. Inside, there will be a subfolder named after A. Inside that folder are mbox files, files with no extension, named e.g. Inbox, Sent etc. Copy the mbox files, renamed if necessary, into the Mail/Local Folders location of the active profile, while TB is closed. To open the profile folder, Help/Troubleshooting, click Open Folder.
When you restart TB, the copied folders will appear under Local Folders, and will not interfere with the existing accounts.
Hello Sea Mac and Sfhowes,
Thank you for your helps!
@ Sea Mac: I think the main error I did was to not check the option “keep Gmail's copy in the inbox” while creating the link between the account A and Gmail on Gmail. But thank you for proposing a solution.
@ Sfhowes: Thank you very much for your solution that worked. Now I imported back the deleted messages (minus the ones of last month) into the account A, and I made a fresh backup ^^
Cheers!
Marjorie