[LBo] Archiving email messages

[Stefan Waidele]

jsl06 at myrealbox.com schrieb:
> Dave,
>     I use pine.  Pine allows you to export the email to a file.  

As I said: I might not be the perfect advisor on this, but I would like
to point out the following:

The UNIX-mbox format for storing mails is...a plain file.
So just about any application that supports mbox (which should be just
about every mailclient in linux), should also display "mails exported to
files"


------------------------
Exporting a Mail Archive
------------------------

In Thunderbird, under "Local Folders", I just created a new folder
"Mail-Archives-Test" and moved 10 messages into it.
I find the mailfolder to be one file
~/.mozilla-thunderbird/m45bxl5s.default/Mail/LocalFolders/Mail-Archive-Test
(Actually, I deleted the space between Local and Folder to prevent
line-wrapping)

If I use "less" to view the file, it is exacly that: A plain text mbox
file, storing my 10 messages. So exporting should not be the problem.

In Thunderbird, I can use these messages like always.

------------------------
Importing a Mail Archive
------------------------

How about importing an Archive that we have saved to disk. Thunderbird
does not seem to "just open" these mbox-files.

I was successfull integrating some archived mails into TB by creating a 
new, empty folder under Local Folders, quiting TB and then copying the 
archive over the empty file that TB has created for the new folder.

This is not what I call user-friendly, but maybe there is some other way 
to access the archive from Thunderbird.

Surely you can access them from other mail-clients like mutt.


HTH,

Stefan








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