Archive accounts
Dear all,
I'm (once again) quitting my job so my institutional email will end soon (I use TB for both personal and professional emails). I'm not found of transferring everything to a permanent personal email account (say gmail or yahoo for instance) so I'm looking for a way to "archive" the account i.e. being able to read the mail in TB while not trying to get new messages.
For some technical details, the account is accessed via IMAP and is stored in TB with the mbox format (the maildir format was not available when I configured it).
This situation happened before: I just let the accounts as this (disabling the automatic update) and for a while it worked but after some time (with many updates of TB and some Ubuntu upgrades too), the mail became unreadable and the folder became filled with thousands (literally) of empty files so I finally destroyed them.
So I was wondering if there is a procedure to mark an account as "inactive" and still being able to read the mail in TB. If not possible, maybe I can create a new local account and copy the mbox files in it to be able to read them again.
Thanks in advance!
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IMAP folders and messages are on he server. You can tell Thunderbird to keep a local copy but as soon as you no longer have contact with hat sever they will be gone. So do something before you are cut off from the server. You can create folders under the Thunderbird Local Folders account and move the messages there. Local folders are actually local o your drive and not in control of any providers server. Thunderbird Archiving might work for you as long as you specify the location of the archive folders to be in Local Folders. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/archived-messages
Thank you for your answer. I forgot to mention that I always configure TB to keep a local copy of the message (even for IMAP accounts).
I will try to create a local account, copy the files and keep the forum informed.
That local copy of IMAP is a cache to speed things up or to be able to read messages when offline. The first time Thunderbird tries to sync with a non-existent server they will go poof and be gone.
Ah thanks for confirming this (I suspected that this happened with my previous accounts).
Maybe there could be a built-in functionality to archive accounts... Or maybe it's just a niche...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/
The import export tools will allow you to export all the mail stored locally in an imap account. The process of exporting breaks the synchronization link to the server, so the cache becomes more permanent. But random Mbox files really are not helpful, so you re-import them using the same tool into local folders.
Now you have a local copy of mail that will remain until you do something to loose it.
Just be sure to create the folder in local folders and select it before you start the import. The tool assume you know what you are doing and does not ask for a folder, just uses what is selected. Or is not available because ou have nothing selected.
@Matt: thanks for your suggestion. I have used ImportExportTools to backup the IMAP account. AFIU it worked.
However when I import the files in "Local Folders" (in a proper subdirectory), the inbox folder only shows messages up to a certain date (September 2016) while other directories (including subdirectories of the inbox) seem to be imported correctly. I have searched in the mbox file for more recent messages and I think they are here. They just don't appear in TB.
Do you have any idea ?
If no, do you know a program that could simply read the mbox files (something very basic) ?
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Using Python, I was able to read the mbox file corresponding to the inbox... So I think the export is OK but the import failed (it failed on 2 computers but not exactly at the same date).
How large is the mbox file? I suspect that the import is timing out because of the size of the file. did you see such a dialog and stop it by any chance?
The mbox file is 330MB. A subdirectory of inbox of 180MB was imported correctly. I haven't seen any timeout message and haven't stopped the import process.
I found that putting all the emails you want to keep into a TB folder called archive, then when you want to reduce the folder to zero, do a "select" all of that folder and r-click to "save as" and go to the previous directoy setup to archive emails and then click open and all the emails you had in TB will go to the local folder you selected. Go back to TB and delete the contents of your archive folder and you now have archived off your emails and clicking on any of them gets it opened in TB like it was there already!