MBOX import from Gmail missing all labels and organization - just one big inbox
Gmail MBOX import through ImportExportTools NG TB add on worked to get the emails into Local Folders, but is one giant box of email instead of the 20 or so labels they were organized with. I thought this import was to maintain the label structure or convert to folder structure. If not, that's fine, but that was the impression I had.
By the way, it's aggravating to NOT INFORM YOUR USERS of your question methodology. To make us Google, ponder and wonder where is the "ask a question" link, to go find complete strangers on the internet to tell us that we have to scroll through pages of irrelevant questions to prove to you our question has not been answered before we are offered a link is just weird, and a huge needless waste of time.
Why do you not just put that right there for us to clearly see? Just put the button there with a line through it telling us we need to work through the support questions before posting a question. Good grief, it took half an hour to find out from a reddit thread how to post a question here.
All Replies (5)
GMail offer an export as one mbox per label... I suggest you use it if you want to retain the structure.
Thanks Matt. Unfortunately Gmail only allows 2 exports per 24 hour period. So this will take about a month at 2 labels per day for 27 days.
Incidentally, I found this out after receiving "Please try to create your export again." after doing 2 exports...had to search the internet for complete strangers to comment that you get that message when you've tried more than 2 exports in a 24 hour period.
Seems everyone does this....create status messages that are a complete lie and tell the user nothing so the user has to run around the internet finding someone who will tell them what the message actually means. Or, don't tell the user anything, and let them scour the internet for strangers who will tell them how the whole process works.
Needlessly stupid. Zero patience for completely dumb things that are not necessary to exist wasting exponential gobs of time.
Anyone else tired of ridiculously obvious dumb things that just sit there and exist anyway? That take virtually no effort to fix, but they just won't?
re :wonder where is the "ask a question" link,
The answer depends upon where you are at the time of wanting to ask a question.
Basically, you need to understand that the Mozilla Support offers support for a variety of forums and one of them is Thunderbird. This means you would have to go through the process of selecting which forum etc etc. There is no auto leap to the Thunderbird forum, which I agree is a bit of a pain, but at the end of the day, this is the 'Mozilla Support' and they are facilitating the Thunderbird Support Forum which offers free help. Mozilla and Thunderbird are not one and the same.
Often, the answer can located in a Help Article which volunteers have alreay pre written as an aid or someone else may have asked the same question and it has a 'chosen solution' you could check out before asking a new question.
From Thunderbird
- Help > Thunderbird Help
- Then scroll down and click on 'Ask the community'
- Select 'Thunderbird'
- Top right 'Ask the community' - click on 'ask now'
If in a forum question
- At the top of page click on 'get Help'
- and then select click on 'Ask the community'
- Select 'Thunderbird'
- Top right 'Ask the community' - click on 'ask now'
Just in case you need a quicklink for the future, but please bare in mind the time of all the unpaid volunteers who man this Support Forum. It really helps if users check out to see if a question has been asked before. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/new/thunderbird/form
re :Gmail MBOX import through ImportExportTools NG TB add on worked to get the emails into Local Folders, but is one giant box of email instead of the 20 or so labels they were organized with. I thought this import was to maintain the label structure or convert to folder structure. If not, that's fine, but that was the impression I had.
I would have thought it depends upon what you selected as the options. ImportExportTools Ng > Import mbox file But then it depends upon what you selected. eg: Import one or more mbox files with it's/their subdirectory. Select just the mbox file, the directory with the same name and the extension \sbd\ will be automatically imported if it exists. So you would select 'Inbox' mbox file and the Inbox subfolders contained in 'Inbox.sbd' folder would also get imported. I have gmail imap account. Inbox has one subfolder. Used the above method to import Inbox and it's subfolder into 'Local Folders'. No problem. Folder hiearchy retained.
tomdickorharry said
Thanks Matt. Unfortunately Gmail only allows 2 exports per 24 hour period. So this will take about a month at 2 labels per day for 27 days.
They limit you to the number of exports per day. They do not limit you to the number of labels you can select for each export.
Try it with 10 or so selected and when you get your take out you get 10 files in a zip.