Mozilla Browser - Saving a folder full of messages to file

Author

Saving a folder full of messages to file

Gualtier Malde

2007-04-09, 7:13 pm

I'm using Thunderbird 1.5.0.1 and have a mailbox with a bunch of messages in it that I want to save
as files. I need to get these and others out of the Moz environment because I have been having
problems and on Thursday will do a wipe/reinstall. I will have saved my profile, but may have to
reverse that if it turns out that restoring the profile restores the problem.

T-bird isn't letting me do that - anything else I can do? I would rather not back up each email
individually.

Thanks

Leonidas Jones

2007-04-09, 7:13 pm

Gualtier Malde wrote:
> I'm using Thunderbird 1.5.0.1 and have a mailbox with a bunch of
> messages in it that I want to save as files. I need to get these and
> others out of the Moz environment because I have been having problems
> and on Thursday will do a wipe/reinstall. I will have saved my profile,
> but may have to reverse that if it turns out that restoring the profile
> restores the problem.
>
> T-bird isn't letting me do that - anything else I can do? I would
> rather not back up each email individually.
>
> Thanks
>

With Thunderbird open, use the UI to create a new folder called Archive.
Move all the mail you wish to save into that folder. Close Thunderbird
and navigate to your profile folder. In the Mail folder, and in the
folder for that particular account, find the file named Archive, with no
extension. That file will contain all the mail you moved. Copy it and
paste it somewhere that you will be able to recover from.

Restoring will be as simple as pasting this file in to the account
folder on a new profile.

Lee

* Rowland Croucher *

2007-04-10, 1:13 am

Leonidas Jones

2007-04-10, 1:13 am

* Rowland Croucher * wrote:
> Leonidas Jones wrote:
>
> Backing up... what's a/the UI?
>

User Interface.

Meaning, use TB to create a new folder, rather trying to do it with
Windows in the Profile folder.

Lee

Gualtier Malde

2007-04-12, 1:13 am

Leonidas Jones wrote:
> Gualtier Malde wrote:
>
> With Thunderbird open, use the UI to create a new folder called Archive.
> Move all the mail you wish to save into that folder. Close Thunderbird
> and navigate to your profile folder. In the Mail folder, and in the
> folder for that particular account, find the file named Archive, with no
> extension. That file will contain all the mail you moved. Copy it and
> paste it somewhere that you will be able to recover from.
>
> Restoring will be as simple as pasting this file in to the account
> folder on a new profile.
>
> Lee
Thank you. I got started and certainly can move some messages.

Actually, I wanted to save the messages as regular documents. I keep important mail, listserve,
and newsgroup information for their educational and/or instructional content, and I would be happy
to have all of them in a text or RTF file for looking at and editing.

I should have been more clear about what I was up to. I hope to restore *all* of the messages to a
new copy of Mozilla when we have reformatted and reinstalled, by saving the Mozilla and Thunderbird
applications files, so that should take care of that. It just seemed like a good time to capture
all the accumulated knowledge in the messages I've saved.

Leonidas Jones

2007-04-12, 1:13 am

Gualtier Malde wrote:
> Leonidas Jones wrote:
> Thank you. I got started and certainly can move some messages.
>
> Actually, I wanted to save the messages as regular documents. I keep
> important mail, listserve, and newsgroup information for their
> educational and/or instructional content, and I would be happy to have
> all of them in a text or RTF file for looking at and editing.
>
> I should have been more clear about what I was up to. I hope to restore
> *all* of the messages to a new copy of Mozilla when we have reformatted
> and reinstalled, by saving the Mozilla and Thunderbird applications
> files, so that should take care of that. It just seemed like a good
> time to capture all the accumulated knowledge in the messages I've saved.

You can, when viewing a message, choose File>>Save As and choose file,
which will save the individual message as a .eml file, which can then be
opened with TB for viewing.

Lee

Gualtier Malde

2007-04-12, 1:27 pm

Leonidas Jones wrote:
> Gualtier Malde wrote:
>
> You can, when viewing a message, choose File>>Save As and choose file,
> which will save the individual message as a .eml file, which can then be
> opened with TB for viewing.
>
> Lee
I do appreciate the answers, but my hope was to back up an entire folder of saved messages to one
file or individual files, and I'm getting the picture that such is not going to be possible. A
slightly more arduous solution would be to go to the application data and open the file for the
folder with something like wordpad and find all the text that's buried there and edit that.

The real lesson: If there is a message with good information worth keeping - like instructions -
back it up on the spot and avoid accumulating a folder full and having to catch up.

That was worth the trip - Thank you.

Doug G

2007-04-12, 1:27 pm

Gualtier Malde wrote:
> Leonidas Jones wrote:
> I do appreciate the answers, but my hope was to back up an entire
> folder of saved messages to one file or individual files, and I'm
> getting the picture that such is not going to be possible. A
> slightly more arduous solution would be to go to the application data
> and open the file for the folder with something like wordpad and find
> all the text that's buried there and edit that.
>
> The real lesson: If there is a message with good information worth
> keeping - like instructions - back it up on the spot and avoid
> accumulating a folder full and having to catch up.
>
> That was worth the trip - Thank you.
>

Backup your mail folders files (Inbox, Sent, etc.), give the backed up
files a .mbx extension, open the MBX files with MsgView.

Download MsgView from http://www.elbiah.de/tools/old/

MsgView works best with plain text messages.