'order received' does not correlate to 'date' or 'date received' - Why ?
I want to bulk export hundreds of emails to make a text [doc] file showing headers and body text in date order, but all methods of export that I can access modify 'date received' and 'date' to 'date of export' which results in meaningless same date/time for every message. I tried 'order received' to mark all mail before export but... the 'order received' is randomly non-sequential in blocks of contiguous numbers and does not reflect date/time received. is my T'bird broken or is there another purpose to 'order received' ?
Thanks in advance and any advice will be appreciated.
Meantime, I'm searching for a software solution for 'email' to text/doc' sorter !
All Replies (2)
Any new file on a computer will have the date it was created / modified as the date located in it's Properties or seen when using a column header eg: 'Date modified'
All computer work exactly the same way. You are creating a new file, the 'Date modified' has nothing to do with the actual email contents, it is to do with when that file was created.
However, saving as a text file or using eg: ImportExportTools addon to export all messages in a single text file does not alter the contents which of course contains the Date etc as it was when email was created.
When an email is downloaded, it is written/appended to an existing mbox file. It is not saved as an individual file, so each time the mbox is updated with contents of a new email, the file date is modified. So file date of the mbox file has nothing to do with the contents of an email.
Hope this explains why you see the 'Modified Date' of the new file not showing the same as the contents of an email date header.
This is not quite what I am seeing.
I installed ThunderBird, and just tested TotalThunderbirdConverter.
I did two tests. The first with 5 emails. They were from 7 years ago, and show up in date order in their folder. Converted all to one Text file, and they now exist completely out-of-order in the output file, not as they are seen in their folder.
Second test with over 750 files, all showing in date order in their folder. Converted to text in one output file, and only the first 1/3 or less are in date order, the rest are well shuffled to random date order.