Arch Linux

yk

Member

Registered: 2014-06-09

Posts: 9

Thunderbird ate an 'archived' mail account

To start with some context, I have several accounts in Thunderbird which no longer exist as mail accounts but I would like to have access to the local archive. One of these accounts is from my old mail server and I had moved the domain to my new server last year. So the mail address was active but was supposed to be an alias of a different account and last year I had found a way to prevent Thunderbird from syncing the local mails to the server. Today I clicked on the account and it started syncing, thus destroying my archived mails. (By dump luck, I have a backup of the profile folder and the mails are there.) My guess is, that the syncing option was reactivated by an update, sometime in the last half year or so.

So two questions, is there a easy way to import the old mails back into Thunderbird and is there an official way to mark an account as an archive instead of an active account? (Plus, should I file a bug report?)

spinnau

Member

Registered: 2017-06-05

Posts: 38

Re: Thunderbird ate an 'archived' mail account

For archiving an unused account I would suggest to move all the folders from that account to Local Folders inside of Thunderbird. You can also create subfolders there for organizing your mails like

Local Folders
|-- MyOldAccount
|   |-- Inbox
|   |-- Sent

Thunderbird saves all mails from one folder inside of one mbox file. You can easily import your old mails from the backup by copying this mbox files to your thunderbird profile folder, maybe directly to "Local Folders". Locate the mbox files in the backup:

$ cd <backup-folder>/.thunderbird/<profile>/Mail/MyAccount/
$ ls
Drafts  Drafts.msf  Inbox  Inbox.msf  Sent  Sent.msf  Trash  Trash.msf

The mbox files containing the mails are the files without extension. The msf-files are index files, that contains some metadata (e.g. flags for deleted mails) and will be automatically recreated by Thunderbird if file is missing. (Sometimes these msf-files get borked and some mails seems to be missing. Then deleting the msf files usually "repairs" the folder.)  Copy the mbox files to the "Local Folders" in your Thunderbird profile. You can also safely rename the mbox files, to make sure, they have a unique name in the destination folder:

/.thunderbird/<profile>/Mail/Local Folders

After that restart Thunderbird. Your copied mbox files should now be visible as separate folders. You can now easily move them around to subfolders inside Thunderbird for organizing.

Edit: And please always make a backup of your Thunderbird profile folder before trying these things.

Last edited by spinnau (2017-06-27 22:07:51)