Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

How do I copy certain e-mail folders & transfer them to a USB drive

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by Zenos

Bokmakierie
Bokmakierie
more options

Hello there, can you help me? I'm running Ubuntu 16.04. There are certain private financial matter e-mails in my Thunderbird received & sent folders which I wish to remove from the PC hard drive & store on a flash drive or removable HDD.

To date I have collated these, created three new folders & put relevant e-mails into the folders. I now wish to move these folders & store them remotely from my PC.

Is this possible using TB? I thought plain Copy/Cut & Paste commands would do the trick, but they don't.

Should they first be archived or what is the best procedure to achieve what I would like?

Hello there, can you help me? I'm running Ubuntu 16.04. There are certain private financial matter e-mails in my Thunderbird received & sent folders which I wish to remove from the PC hard drive & store on a flash drive or removable HDD. To date I have collated these, created three new folders & put relevant e-mails into the folders. I now wish to move these folders & store them remotely from my PC. Is this possible using TB? I thought plain Copy/Cut & Paste commands would do the trick, but they don't. Should they first be archived or what is the best procedure to achieve what I would like?

All Replies (3)

Zenos
Zenos
more options

What do you want to do with the messages in their new location?

Drag-and-drop, or File|Save will save them as eml files which are relatively portable to other email clients. (D&D doesn't always work so well in Linux. :-( ). But you'll need an email client to make sense of them.

If you want to just read them independently, then exporting them to a text format may be useful. Given a large number of messages to process, I'd use the ImportExportTools add-on. This will give you plain text, html and pdf formats as options. But exporting them like this loses all the threading.

For backup purposes, I'd just copy the associated mbox files. That add-on can help with doing this too.

It all comes down to what you want to do with the saved files.

https://freeshell.de/~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html

Modified by Zenos

Bokmakierie
Bokmakierie Question owner
more options

Hello Zenos,

Thank you for your solutions. You ask a good question. The answer is that I want to keep them for later viewing when I will merely load them back on the PC.

Please explain where to find the Import/Export add-on? Is it available from Tools?

Cheers

Zenos
Zenos
more options

"…keep them for later viewing…" sounds easy, but it comes down to how you want to view them. HTML and PDF release you from the complications of using an email client, but they do lose context. And if your messages have any attachments make sure that you're happy with whether or not they are included.

https://freeshell.de/~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/installing-addon-thunderbird