On 22/06/14 17:18, Chris Green wrote:
On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 01:54:59PM +0100, nev young wrote:
On 22/06/14 13:39, Chris Green wrote:My wife is using Thunderbird on a new[ish] xubuntu 14.04 system. She has now got it fairly well configured and working the way she wants so the next step is to move her old 'local' E-Mail across.
No way is this remotely easy, I can sort of see how it might be done but there are so many gotchas that I fear it's going to be a mess.
Why can't modern E-Mail program simply use mbox (or maildir, I'm not too fussed) as they were designed rather than having to add all sorts of specially named directories and indexes?
Do you have ImportExportTools 2.8.0.4 installed as an addon for Thunderbird?Not yet but I've read about it, I don't think it really does what we want because it will rename the 'imported' local directory as 'local<something>' apparently, that's just what we don't want. We want to integrate the imported stuff into the existing local directory (mostly as new sub-directories).
Once the old stuff is imported into local<something>, simply create the new subdirectories you want, then drag and drop the emails from imported<something> into the relevant subdirectory.
You could use the Edit/Find/Search Messages to help select groups of emails and then there's a button at the bottom of the results window that allows you to move or refile the messages somewhere else. Alternatively, you can use the quick filter to (er) quickly and simply filter messages, which again, you can drag and drop to the relevant subdirectory.
I believe you can also set up rules to move things for you, but I don't know how.
Have you tried Thunderbird's import feature? If that doesn't work, ISTR that you can just drag a mbox file from a file explorer into a pre-created folder in thunderbird and it will import all the files for you.
Re "Why can't modern E-Mail program simply use mbox (or maildir, I'm not too fussed) as they were designed rather than having to add all sorts of specially named directories and indexes?"
Well my thunderbird works via imap supplied by dovecot, and does work off a mbox format files. It doesn't "have" to add all sorts of special directories and indexes, but it does because some people want things like fast searching and offline access. Some of these things can be disabled - e.g. Account Settings/Synchronisation & Storage/Keep messages for this account on this computer (unticked).
HTH Steve