Thunderbird flaw: Is lack of built-in export function intentional or just stupid?

You should read the full story, as it comes out that thunderbird is finally *not* faulty.

The user should learn that some softwares dont require fancy fonctions to do simple tasks, such as "copying a directory"...

> You should read the full story, as it comes out that thunderbird is finally *not* faulty.

Assuming you didn't already know that, yes.

"> You should read the full story, as it comes out that thunderbird is finally *not* faulty."

"Assuming you didn't already know that, yes."

Or to discover that the author already knows this :)

The nice thing about a good export tool is it lets you export selectively-- it separates mailboxes, address books, and accounts. Nicer than being stuck with moving the whole blob.

The point I'm trying to make in the post is that exporting mail out of an application should be a basic function of that app and not something for which the user needs to start Googling and looking for extensions in order to accomplish.

Hey, if there's an import in the menu, there should be an export.

Now it seems that I do have access to my Thunderbird mail directory. Once I actually do successfully move and back it up, I'll amend the post to reflect that.

Unfortunately, now that I've been using Thunderbird for a couple of weeks on the second computer, I need to figure out how to bring the old mail into the new installation without wiping either one of them out.

If what I did all day was provide support for POP mail users, I would probably know exactly what to do, but since I've been POP-ing mail in Thunderbird for all of two weeks after a couple years of IMAP, I'm a little leery of killing out hundreds of messages at a crack.

It makes Gmail, Yahoo Mail and the rest of the Web-based solutions look very welcoming, indeed.

If I wanted to muck around with configuration files, procmail, fetchmail, sendmail and whatever else one needs to move messages to the proper places, I'd be a real geek and use mutt. But I'm not — and I don't.

Quoting:The point I'm trying to make in the post is that exporting mail out of an application should be a basic function of that app

The problem with that idea is that there is no standard "email export format" - so how would the app export the mail? as a tarball of mbox files? a maildir? a pst file? inquiring minds want to know.

If Thunderbird has the smarts to import emails from [insert email program here], it also has the smarts to export them the same way.

Quoting:If Thunderbird has the smarts to import emails from [insert email program here], it also has the smarts to export them the same way.

So, you're saying, thunderbird should be able to say "create and populate an ms outlook mail folder from my thunderbird local folders" - hmmm, don't know of *any* mail client that does anything remotely similar.

Oops, should it overwrite any existing mail folders? ouch.

Pretty tall order, methinks, for zero gain to the thunderbird folks..

Serious question: Can it import from Outlook? Or does it import a folder that Outlook exported into its own standard export-format?

And, honestly, I've seen Outlook have problems keeping track of its own folder stuff; I won't fault Thunderbird for being afraid to touch something M$ can't manage properly.

> I need to figure out how to bring the old mail into the new installation without wiping either one of them out.

From memory, Thunderbird uses a set of folders with mbox format mail files. If so, just create your folders and copy the contents over.

Quoting:So, you're saying, thunderbird should be able to say "create and populate an ms outlook mail folder from my thunderbird local folders" - hmmm, don't know of *any* mail client that does anything remotely similar.

Simply exporting selected mails to a standard mbox file should pose no challenge though...

> Simply exporting selected mails to a standard mbox file should pose no challenge though...

If I'm remembering correctly (see above), it does that. Simply create a folder called export and copy the emails you want to export to it, and you'll have exactly what you wanted.

That's the whole point. Thunderbird already uses standard formats, so moving your email is easy.

A quick Google search reveals that Thunderbird does in fact use mbox formatted files and does have an import/export extension available:

"Thunderbird, Netscape, Mozilla Suite and SeaMonkey use mbox files to store the messages for a folder. The ImportExportTools extension can import and export mbox and .EML files."

You can find more at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_and_exporting_your_mail

Quoting:If I'm remembering correctly (see above), it does that. Simply create a folder called export and copy the emails you want to export to it, and you'll have exactly what you wanted.

Now that's what I'm talking about: A simple, clear and clean solution. I'm gonna try it tomorrow.

> Simply exporting selected mails to a standard mbox file should pose no challenge though...

Why export it? thunderbird mail is already in mbox format. now don't get me wrong, mbox makes sense to me, but it's not a truly universal format - for instance, it won't be readable by users of say, ms outlook, kmail or mac mail.

herzeleid: I'm still praying for the day that Thunderbird starts supporting maildir so I can easily use rsync for my backups. It's one of the mail reasons I want to move to IMAP, so I can use maildir to store my mail but still use Thunderbird to read it.

I was tired of copying things over when changing mail clients or machines. The solution I found cleanest is to run a local dovecot imap server and feed mail into it using getmail or fetchmail (+ freepops for webmail) using cron. The dovecot server is configured to use $HOME/Mail directory as the maildir root. So any email client can be configured to use the local IMAP server, and one can create folders on IMAP as desired. Backing up and moving is simple and requires copying the relevant maildir sub-folders, and deals well with changing mail clients too. However, this will not work for copying to windows (which I have no need for).

@sander - excellent point....