Doug’s Dynamic Drivel

Ever since I got this new laptop I’ve been intending to write this . Lacking any ideas for another topic this will have to do

If you are a Thunderbird mail client users and are switching computers you need to move your message databases to the new computer and this can pose a problem. With Thunderbird you can’t just paste them into the same location on the new computer as they were on the old one. You first have to create the same email accounts then drop the .sbd folders and mail databases into the right accounts (you can forget about moving the .msf files they are an index file that needs to be recreated anyway.)

This is where the problem comes into play if you have more than one email account set up in Thunderbird. Regardless of what you call the account when you are setting it up Thunderbird will identify it on your drive as a variation of mail.youremaildomain.tld for the first account then mail-1.youremaildomain.tld for the next and mail-2.youremaildomain.tld etc. for each email address at each domain by putting all the files for each address inside a directory named that way. So if you have multiple email addresses on one domain how do you know which directory is for which email account, and to complicate matters further when you to to recreate your accounts on the new system if you don’t enter the in the same sequence you did on the old account the mail-x part will be different.

When you look in a directory for your mail databases you will see two files for each mail folder you see in the Thunderbird. The default “folders” for each email account are

• Inbox
• Drafts
• Templates
• Sent
• Junk
• Deleted

(folders is in quotes because on your hard drive they are actually two files not a folder) and for each of those folders you will see two files. For example for Inbox folder you will see a file with no extension called Inbox, which is the database of he messages currently in your Inbox folder, and Inbox.msf which is an index of those messages. There will be nothing there to identify which email address this is for.

Here’s how I solved that problem. As I do substantial sorting and storing of my email under different accounts and different folders I prefer to set up those custom folders all under one location under Local Folders in Thunderbird then set up rules to move my email to the appropriate folder when it arrives. Then I created in each account a sub-folder named for that account. This way if I have to move the mail to another computer I can go look at the actual mail directories on the hard drive and see that name show up as a x and x.msf file and I then know what account it is and can move it to the correct directory on the new computer.

Convoluted I know and made so by my desire to sort my mail into specific folders rather than leaving it in the inbox and by NOT creating those specific folders under the incoming mail account but under Local Folders.

Related posts

• No related posts.