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Yearly Archiving of emails on Thunderbird and Accessing them again.

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  • Last reply by Stans

gullinbursti
gullinbursti
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Hi Everyone, I am having a bit of trouble understanding how IMAP works. I read the section on it, but I want to archive my emails yearly and be able to access them again. I keep receiving a message that my IMAP storage is full.

I want to store the Archived Emails from previous years on my hard drive. I want to keep an active IMAP Account for the current year that stores my emails both on my hard drive and on my providers IMAP server.

I have been successful in creating several Archive folders, but it seems to be difficult to get these all to display in thunderbird. I might need an email I wrote from 2011. So, I do not want to erase any of my thunderbird emails. I want to be able to archive them for each year and be able to access each archived year as necessary. I want to be able to access all of my email data from past years.

I have gone into Options>>>Account Settings>>>Local Folders and I see a path there to a .sbd file, but how do I get this path to point to all of the .sbd files for each of the archived years and have them appear in my thunderbird? I have a feeling I am going about this the wrong way. Please inform me how I can save all of my emails for each year and have them be accessable through thunderbird.

Hi Everyone, I am having a bit of trouble understanding how IMAP works. I read the section on it, but I want to archive my emails yearly and be able to access them again. I keep receiving a message that my IMAP storage is full. I want to store the Archived Emails from previous years on my hard drive. I want to keep an active IMAP Account for the current year that stores my emails both on my hard drive and on my providers IMAP server. I have been successful in creating several Archive folders, but it seems to be difficult to get these all to display in thunderbird. I might need an email I wrote from 2011. So, I do not want to erase any of my thunderbird emails. I want to be able to archive them for each year and be able to access each archived year as necessary. I want to be able to access all of my email data from past years. I have gone into Options>>>Account Settings>>>Local Folders and I see a path there to a .sbd file, but how do I get this path to point to all of the .sbd files for each of the archived years and have them appear in my thunderbird? I have a feeling I am going about this the wrong way. Please inform me how I can save all of my emails for each year and have them be accessable through thunderbird.

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Stans
Stans
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IMAP gives you a remote view of your mailbox. What you see via Thunderbird is exactly what is on the remote server. The actions you take via Thunderbird are mirrored on the remote server. Likewise, the actions you take on the remote server are mirrored in Thunderbird. This keeps the server and Thunderbird in sync. For example, if you create a folder on the remote server, the folder also appears in Thunderbird.

I have been successful in creating several Archive folders, but it seems to be difficult to get these all to display in thunderbird

If you created those archive folders on the server, then subscribe to those folders in Thunderbird. You will see the Subscribe option when you right-click the account in Thunderbird's Folder Pane. This will open a dialog showing the IMAP folders that exist on the server, allowing you to subscribe/unsubscribe as desired. Your archive folders should appear in the list and you should be able to place a tick next to them to subscribe to them. Restart Tbird to force it to reload the folders listed in the Folder Pane.

To store those archive folders on your computer (locally), create them as subfolders under the Local Folders account, then select the messages in each of the remote archive folders, not exceeding 2000 messages at a time, and use the Copy To option that appears when you right-click selected messages, to copy them to their respective yearly local archive folders. Do NOT use the Move To option! Once you've copied all the old messages to their respective local archive folders and confirmed that they were indeed saved in the local folders, you can then delete them from the remote/IMAP archive folders to remove them from the server and free up storage space on the server.