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Restore from a Copied IMAP Folder

  • 3 replies
  • 0 have this problem
  • 4 views
  • Last reply by Matt

Oluwapelumi Ebinisa
Oluwapelumi Ebinisa
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Good day,

When moving email servers from Webmail to Zoho, I logged in to all the emails I wanted to backup/copy on my machine and made a copy of the IMAP folder. Fast forward, I want to restore/read from these legacy emails locally on Thunderbird on a different installation, and I'm finding it difficult.

I copied the folders back into the IMAP folder of the new machine but nothing happened.

I would appreciate help with this restoration.

Best,

~Ebinisa

Good day, When moving email servers from Webmail to Zoho, I logged in to all the emails I wanted to backup/copy on my machine and made a copy of the IMAP folder. Fast forward, I want to restore/read from these legacy emails locally on Thunderbird on a different installation, and I'm finding it difficult. I copied the folders back into the IMAP folder of the new machine but nothing happened. I would appreciate help with this restoration. Best, ~Ebinisa

All Replies (3)

david
david
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Ok, I may be misunderstanding, but if you downloaded the messages, then both message folder items (e.g., INBOX, INBOX.msf ) should be copied to Mail\Local Folders, as they are no longer IMAP entities from within windows file explorer and then restart thunderbird. If you want the messages to be online, you can copy them in small groups, but that can be problematic as IMAP wasn't designed to work that way.

Oluwapelumi Ebinisa
Oluwapelumi Ebinisa Question owner
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Hello David,

Thank you for your reply.

I actually do not need the messages online. For the highlighted steps, I did exactly as advised. My backup IMAP folder is structured as follows: 

- mail.domain.org
- mail.domain.org.msf
- mail.domain-1.org
- mail.domain-1.org.msf
- ...

When I copied mail.domain.org and mail.domain.org.msf into Mail/Local Folders, for example, and restarted Thunderbird, the app created the following additional files in Mail/Local Folders: 

- mail.domain.org.sbd
- - INBOX
- - INBOX.msf

In Thunderbird, I could see the following tree: 

- Local Folders
- ...
- mail.domain.org
- - INBOX

However, there are no messages. The INBOX is reading 0 messages.

Looking forward to more guidance.

Regards,

Matt
Matt
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Put simply. IMAP is syncronised to the server. What you did is so far outside what you should have done that what you actually have is questionable. Especially as not all IMAP accounts store any messages locally, it all depends on what the setting were at the time the copies were made.

However, generally the best way to try and recover is to use the import export tools addon. It is also the best way to make archival local copies of accounts before they are closed and can no longer sync. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools-ng/?src=ss

Generally mail is stored locally in MBOX files and the addon offers a point and click way to get to your mbox mail (if there is any) Including a recursive import looking for sub folders that works with the type of files you appear to have made.

Use the import mbox menu item in the tools to import all mbox files from a directory with SDB structure.