how do i export identities and the account they belong to?
hi,
my email host up 'til now has supported catchall mailboxes. i have several domains; each has a catchall. i often create email addresses on they fly (say, i bought something from company a, i would give them company_a@mydomain.com). if it were someone that i would be emailing regularly, i would create a forward at the host (company_a@mydomain.com auto-forwards to main_account@mydomain.com), plus an identity in thunderbird attached to main_account.
if it is someone i will have limited mail from (say my auto insurance), i would still set up an identity in thunderbird, but skip the forward at the host, and those mails would land in catchall@mydomain.com.
now, my mail host says they are removing support for catchall accounts. i will create explicit forwards at the host, but i don't know how to easily extract a list of all identities (and their respective "real" email addresses) from thunderbird.
just for a laugh, i tried importing prefs.js into excel, then filtering the records (i thought) i wanted. i'm wondering though if there is some easier way to do this.
thanks
- edit to remove space.
Modified by theGander
All Replies (2)
Go to Tools|Options|Advanced|Genera→Config Editor.
Acknowledge the warning. We're not going to intentionally change anything. This is just another way to view prefs.js, but it has a useful search tool.
Type useremail into the search box. Does this show all your email identities? When I checked, it listed the one or two secondary identities I have set up, but I am not sure it will exactly suit your needs.
However for each of the useremail entries, there is a reference to "id{n}" where {n} is an internal reference number, and in searching for mail.identity.id{n} I see some strings which hint at which email account each one is associated with. You can use a star/asterisk as a wildcard serch, so if you find a line that tells you the parent account name, you could search on that item with an * in place of the numerical reference value.
So, for me, using:
mail.identity.id*.archive_folder
as a search term lists all the working account names, though you will find that some odd substitutions occur. For instance, %40 will be used to represent the '@' in an email address.
I think with some low cunning and appropriate search tools, you could find all the usermail entries in the prefs.js file and their associated id{n} values, and from those, find the parent email accounts.
As you appear to be a Windows user, I recommend Notepad++ as a fairly powerful file search tool.
Do make your own copy of prefs.js to work with; you don't want to damage the working copy!
Modified by Zenos
i tried using the config editor (thanks for the warnings, one can't be too careful with this stuff). main problem is that i have between 70-75 identities in there, and i can't extract just this info as a file.
i guess i was hoping there was some way to query it like a database and get the user emails with their 'parent' email account as a text list.
i was able finally to filter/sort data by importing it into excel, that gave me the identities. prefs.js contains user_pref("mail.account.account14.identities", "id17,id24,id7,id10,id39,id47,id49"); which i can tie to the excel list, but i haven't figured out how to decode the mail.account.account{n} as there doesn't seem to be a record matching the account{n} with it's human name (the archive folders were setup haphazardly. my bad, but i was in a hurry).
yes, i am on windows (though i've got a mac running a copy of thunderbird. it's just not my main machine). and i agree, notepad++ is my text editor of choice.
tx for your input.