So I've got a million folders on an email account of mine, many are old and I'd rather just save em somewhere, put em on a CD and then delete the imap folder....how do I do this?

6/6/2008 1:53:09 PM

didn't you just answer your own question?

6/6/2008 2:06:38 PM

OK..perhaps a better question and I guess this is a two parter.... First, if I save the emails locally, they're going to be in a thundbird mail format (i.e. whatever extension will only be able to be opened by tbird right?) so I guess that's fine, but do I export the emails? Do I drag em into a completely different folder on my desktop or something? Can I export them into some other format like csv or something like that? Yes, I'm clueless when it comes to email type issues...and I'm also OCD and can't part with anything, ever, no matter how useless it may actually be

6/6/2008 2:12:54 PM

Thunderbird does not use a proprietary mailbox format like Outlook does ... it uses a very standard and importable format. Just keep doing what you were doing, you got it.

(Btw, you really don't want to store email in CSV either)

6/6/2008 2:23:38 PM

right, my point was that tbird stores mail in the open "mbox" format, which is supported by lots of systems and is open and easy to backup, import, etc. To backup or archive, you can just copy the mail folders from your Profile to somewhere else.

or you can use MozBackup, which will do the same thing
http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/

6/6/2008 2:30:30 PM

well I dragged a folder to my desktop (not that it matters but I'm using my mac) and the messages had an .emix extension....not sure if it'll work elsewhere (I mean I'm hoping and you guys say so so I'll believe you) but it works on this comp...so thank you!

6/6/2008 2:56:31 PM

rather than create a new thread, i figured i'd resurrect a very old one

my thunderbird folder is almost 26GB...since i have to use this stupid small SSD (seriously, who gets by with just 128GB?) on my work laptop, i'm trying to clear up some room

is there a way to have thunderbird only keep local copies of messages that are only X number of days old? i could get by just fine with local copies of the last 90 days

i'd rather do this in thunderbird instead of moving mail around in my multiple accounts...i've never set the "archive" label to any of my messages in gmail, but if i can do that (make everything 90 days or older automatically archive and prevent thunderbird from downloading anything labeled as such), that will take care of the bulk

7/16/2013 3:08:59 PM