Thunderbird Tip: How to archive old messages

Posted by Martin in Email, Knowledge  Tags: , ,

1

Nov


I had lots of messages in my Thunderbird mail accounts. More than 1200 send messages and more than 1500 incoming message. The send messages alone had a size of more than 25 Megabytes while the incoming a combined size of more than 800 Megabytes. This made my decision to clean up the mails even easier.

The best way in my opinion would be to archive all old messages that I would not need anymore and remove them from Thunderbird completely. After thinking about the how-to for a while I found a method that was working perfectly. Thunderbird creates so called mail folders in its profile folder. Inside those mail folders are files without an extension and msf files of the same name.

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.

After doing that you close Thunderbird and go to the profile folder, normally located in the Application Data of the Documents & Settings folder.

I did create a new folder mail-backups and moved the files sent-071101 and sent-071101.msf into it. The mails that have been moved into that folders are not shown in Thunderbird anymore. I simply proceeded with other mails that I did want to archive and repeated the process again.

This is also an excellent way of backing up your emails regularly. Just copy all those files from the mail folders to another location or burn those to DVD or CD.

Finding the Thunderbird profile folder:

The Thunderbird profile folder is by default located at C:\Documents and Settings\van dread\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\XXXXXX.default\Mail\

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8 Users Commented In This Post

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Ace_NoOne says, November 1st, 2007   

I’m also still looking for a good way of archiving Thunderbird messages externally (other than using MozBackup).

A while ago I’d created an extension to help me keep my inbox(es) clean:
One-Click Archiver: archiving mails to correct sub-folders
I haven’t had the inclination to perfect the code, but it’s been doing wonders for me, for almost a year now.

Martin says, November 1st, 2007   

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

I will take a look at the extension tomorrow. Thanks for posting that.

Ace_NoOne says, November 1st, 2007   

> 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… )

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David says, December 7th, 2007   

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

Tom says, January 13th, 2008   

“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.)

Mike Marion says, February 1st, 2008   

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

Subhendu Sarkar says, April 17th, 2008   

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) !!

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