Thunderbird flaw: Is lack of built-in export function intentional or just stupid?
The fact that Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client has no built-in way to export the whole of a user's mail from one installation to another is as close to a fatal flaw as can be for a class of application — the stand-alone mail client — as can be.
Now that I've had a week or so since I started trying to move mail from one box to another, I've learned that there are a couple of plugins out there for Thunderbird that supposedly help you do this.
Even so, the consensus appears to be that you need to just pull the whole nested-directory mess over from one installation to the next. The problem for me is that I don't have access to the proper directory on my Windows box, so I'll have to do it with a Linux live CD).
Would it kill the developers to embed export functionality into Thunderbird? Would that be so terrible, allowing users to have a little control and freedom when it comes to how they access their own e-mail?
You can easily import messages into Thunderbird (Tools -- Import in the menu). For the sake of freedom and sanity, it should be just as easy to export out of the app.
Is there a reason Thunderbird doesn't include export? I'd sure like to know.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
I'm using Thunderbird since ages and never had problems moving my installation from one box to the other.
Just open Explorer and change your preferences in order to see hidden files.
Then go to your "doc & Settings" directory, and you should see an (previously hidden) "Application Data" directory. In there you'll find Thunderbird's secret profile structure. Just copy the content of the directory in there with the random name to the directory in the new system. The two directory names (old and new) will be different, but Thunderbird does not complain about that.
Hope this will help
Thanks for the tip (which applies to Windows XP, in case anybody is wondering). I'm doing it now. If I can manage to get in there at all (I'm not the admin on the box), I'll see how it works. Right now it's taking 29 minutes (by the box's count) to change the attributes in the directory and everything below it.
Wait ... I think I'm turn my files from non-hidden to hidden ... I can't wait to see how this is going to turn out ... (not).
(Minutes later: Yep, that hid them all. I had to switch the system to show me the hidden files and folders, then unhide them. Do you love Windows as much as I do? I thought so.)
I'll just have to go in there with Puppy Linux or something and copy the directories to a CD or FTP them. Then I can somehow try to amalgamate all the messages into one account. Clearly — VERY CLEARLY — it would have been a better idea to figure this out BEFORE I started using two Thunderbird installs ...
OMG !
This article got on Lxer under a title blaming Thunderbird ... alas ! as these comments proves it, thunderbird is not at fault, but your own lack of knowledge at windows OS. (in that regard : juste like me ;-) windows beeing unnecessarily complicated when it comes to simple things )
There is simply NO NEED to have an export fonctionality, because nothing is hidden in strange places or crypted or what not. Welcome to open world. Move your files around. (_your_ files = in _your_ profile = you necessarily have permissions on them, on any OS).
"allowing users to have a little control" ... well, learn to use the control you already have boy ;-)
I'm fully capable of copying and moving whatever directories need to be moved. And it turns out that I apparently do have access to them.
Never mind that now I need to reconcile TWO Thunderbird installations and somehow bring the two sets of folders/directories together somehow.
My point is that a GUI program designed to make sending, receiving, reading and archiving mail EASIER shouldn't include an import function but not an export function in the GUI.
Users of Thunderbird shouldn't need to use the shell (be it in Windows or Unix) to back up or move their e-mail.
If I wanted to screw around with plain-text configuration files, I'd run mutt in Unix, which I've done before. I don't like it. That's why on the rare occasions when I do use stand-alone mail-client software, I tend to use something like Thunderbird or Sylpheed (the latter of which I haven't used lately). And it should be an easy task to extract my mail from the system in a nice, pretty package and do with said package whatever I please: Move it to another Thunderbird box, another app entirely, or just keep it as a backup.
I agree it's a big oversight. A friend rang me a while back to ask how to export his mail folder and I had to explain to him how to unhide and copy the profile folders as I couldn't find any other way. Maybe if enough people request this feature it will be added to the next version.
On my Unix/Linux boxes, I use rsync for backup, and that catches any and all mail I might have in my /home directory. My next backup plan, in OpenBSD anyway, is to use a package called Duplicity, which from my now-feeble understanding of it, brings together a bunch of other backup-related tools.
What Duplicity promises to do is back up not just over the network or to another drive, but to the Amazon S3 cloud.
I realized this is off-topic a bit, but ANY mail client that, as one reader above suggests, packs all your mail into a tarball for easy archiving and transfer, is something I'd be very interested in. Yeah, I know I can do this myself from the shell, but I'm lazy enough not to figure it out, and I'd rather the app do it for me.