Comments on: Thunderbird Tip: How to archive old messages

By: Yiorgos

Yiorgos — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 06:05:19 +0000

You can try Mail Viewer.
You can open-view any Outlook Express, Windows Mail/Windows Live Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird message databases as well as single EML files.
It’s portable, that means no installation.

http://www.mitec.cz/mailview.html

By: Peter Steier

Peter Steier — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 06:10:36 +0000

Now I’m confused; Mitch, do you support my view or do you disagree :-?

But you are right; I do many thing as I did before 2001. Some thinks loose their value (like the MicroVAX on which I read my first e-mails, or vi with which I edited my first e-mails) but others don’t (like Drag&Drop and the KISS principle: Keep It Simple and Stupid).

In 1999 I started archiving my mails als .eml as the best compromize; They are now (password protected) on a Web-Server, with full-text search through recoll, on my laptop, and also on my Smartphone, with automatic sync.
I have lost the older mails, because I relied on something advanced for which the programming gurus at “digital” around VAX/VMS had got their act together to develop something really good exactly to do what was mentioned here AUTOMATICALLY…

I want my archived mails to last longer than short-lived technologies like VAX/VMS, the IMAP protocol, the .msf and .eml file formats, Thunderbird, MS Windows, or silicon-based computers.

By: Mitch

Mitch — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:05:54 +0000

/* Though, even a dummy could make backups then… */

Correct but, why do we develop and develop and develop and call ourselves all ‘brain sugeonetic extreme experts with 26,7 PHDs and then fall back to what we already did last century?

oh – “surgeonetic” – I just made this word up in the hope it’ll get accepted into the dictionary … ;-)

By: Peter Steier

Peter Steier — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 20:56:00 +0000

There is one logical way to archive e-mails:
http://www.howtodothings.com/computers/a2431-how-to-archive-emails.html
Only that you have to “download message bodys” manually. However, does not work on Thunderbird :-(

Even more progressive: why not store each mail locally as a file system folder, with a “main.txt” inside, together with the attachments as simple files? Though, even a dummy could make backups then…

By: Mitch

Mitch — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 03:59:39 +0000

*** MARTIN ***

Thanks for the tip here
I addressed this already here http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/07/thunderbird-archiving-shortcuts/ before reading your post .

Question is – WHY can’t the developers around Thunderbird get their act together to develop something really good. Something that would exactly do what you mentioned here (I found our after digging around in these folders, too… to mention is that you first need to activate “show hidden files) – AUTOMATICALLY.

But instead of doing so, this would make life a little easier for the normal folk they would never have a clue what to do, the programming gurus come up with a useless “archiving” extension and so much other crap, simply duplicating and triplicating things they are already there.

Do they really have it necessary to get their mark this way?

Instead of refining and improving … we just add something new and another one new thing and now we work with a million things and never know what really!

Something to think about

By: Nemo

Nemo — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:05:10 +0000

Why not just use Outlook? Well, because it *doesn’t* make life easier — you can only have 20-some odd filtering rules and that’s just not enough to automatically maintain an active mailbox

By: Observer

Observer — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:15:24 +0000

Thanks for good article.

By: Al Del Vecchio

Al Del Vecchio — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:00:41 +0000

Why won’t people just use Outlook and make your lives simpler.

By: David Landin

David Landin — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:40:02 +0000

One option is to use a free online server. I use Inbox.com which offers a staggering 5gb free storage space. To use it, I create an Inbox.com account such as
Johnssentemails@inbox.com

Then I use Thunderbird to send an automatic bcc copy of every email I write to that Inbox.com address.

I do this in Thunderbird by going to
Tools – Account settings – Copies and folders – [X] bcc these email addresses Johnssentemails@inbox.com

You do need to log in to the inbox account from time to time to show it is active, but this works well for me.

By: Nigel Lomas

Nigel Lomas — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:25:27 +0000

Thank’s Martin, I downloaded TB portable which may work perfectly if I could get it to show my profile and mail – it may be that I have to enter the Pop/account info manually before the mail directories will show. It refers to using an ini file which is different depending on where you get the sample ini file from. I will keep trying.

By: Martin

Martin — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:55:13 +0000

Nigel well you can simply open them in a text editor and view them that way. I would have to do some research otherwise. Maybe a portable email client that would be put on the DVD with the emails could be a solution.

By: Nigel Lomas

Nigel Lomas — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:47:21 +0000

I would like to archive TB emails to DVD and be able to view/lookup emails in the archive directly without using Thunderbird. Any thoughts?

By: Turpin

Turpin — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 08:30:52 +0000

I was cut off by the timer……..
…. “that give us the option.” Why….. is there a timer……

By: Turpin

Turpin — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 08:24:47 +0000

Doesn’t it seem a bit stupid to store seperate emails inside a proprietary archive when there’s a perfectly good file system sitting outside it? I’ve been looking all over for a way to store email messages as seperate files for file-synchronizing between computers, or even for linking to them from events and tasks in organizer software. Okay, so there wouldn’t be compression (necessarily), but I don’t need it. And encryption is taken care of by Truecrypt. And as far as I know, there are no email clients in existence for Windows that gives us the option. None!

By: Subhendu Sarkar

Subhendu Sarkar — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 08:03:24 +0000

Is it possible with Thunderbird to archive certain mails contained in a directory and view them afterwards. I do not want to archive the mails inside the existing Thunderbird setup but I will copy them in a DVD, for example. Can I access them as and when required with Thunderbird in future?

To put it more concretely, suppose I have an email account now which I want to discard but keep a copy of the mails. I need to make a backup of those mails in such a way that Thunderbird can read them in future, if required. Please note that from now on I will be using a new email account and Thunderbird would be configured with the new email account.

I know the technique of copying the files in the “xxxxxxx.default” folder but in such a case the entire profile is copied and for my case I will again get my old profile (for the OLD email account) back but I will loose my new profile (for the NEW email account) !!

By: Mike Marion

Mike Marion — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:27:43 +0000

All the archive answers are interesting but…
I need a way to view/search these archived messages at a later date without switching files and profiles etc.
Ideally a way to open an “external” source under the “folders” directory window.

Any suggestions?

Mike

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 02:43:42 +0000

“The idea was to create a new folder, name it accordingly and move it out of the Thunderbird profile folder. I created a folder sent-071101 and moved all sent mails into the folder that were older than one month. This can be done by simply dragging and dropping those mails into the new folder.”

There is a quicker way to do this. Close Thunderbird first. Then go to the profile folder on your computer and sipmly rename the folder called “Sent” to “sent-071101″ or whatever you want. You can then move the renamed folder somewhere else if you want to, or if you leave it in the profile folder, it will show up as a new folder when you restart Thunderbird.

When you restart Thunderbird, it will create an empty Sent folder automatically. (This works for all the standard Thunderbird folders.)

By: David

David — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:39:04 +0000

Hi guys,
Apologies to bring this back a level. How do you configure T-bird to re-access the archives once they have been made? I had a prob with T-bird, installed again. Now I can’t view past mails, despite them being “archived” in the original profile folder.
Cheers

By: 如何在Thunderbird中备份旧邮件 » Ghacks CN

如何在Thunderbird中备份旧邮件 » Ghacks CN — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 09:52:49 +0000

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By: Ace_NoOne

Ace_NoOne — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:09:42 +0000

> Well you can basically use any backup software that you like and
> just schedule the backup of the complete profile folder.

Yeah, but ideally, there’d be truly separate “modules” (I believe Outlook allows you to create separate files for archiving – but I despise Outlook, so I wouldn’t know for sure).

As for the extension: I’d love to see someone taking over, perfecting the code. (I’m not too good with Mozilla extensions… )