import them!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/

Matt said

import them! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/

You probably missed the part in my post that said I tried using the importexporttool and it takes way too long with 39,000 emails. It seemed to be moving at the rate of about 1 per second if that. Have you used the tool? Is it supposed to work faster than that?

No I did not miss it, I chose to ignore it.

If you chose to find a product on the web that can convert your 39,000 files into mbox files, then Thunderbird will read them natively. But you chose to assemble a prodigious collection of files outside of an email application. You are going to have issues moving that many email regardless of what you do really.

Thunderbird can accept a drag and drop of emails, but it can be unreliable and messy.

I suggest you tell your anti virus to stop scanning each and every file when it is opened if you want better performance. Anti virus program have a general overhead of something like 30% slow down on the device they are installed on. In the case of thousands of small text files they can impact things to the point the import script simply times out. Anti virus products are not your friend.

Like markusallen, I have thousands of messages in hundreds of organized folders going back 25 years. Yes, 25. And that organization is value-added and very efficient. Word-search is fine but it can be slow and annoying. Those folders were created with Pine and then its successor Alpine. Alas, my access to Alpine now has to work with Outlook and that is a nightmare. Someone said I should try Thunderbird. Guess not. The options - and the attitude of the top contributor here - convince me that I had better just install Alpine on my laptop. It was created by people who appreciated that arrogance about what they knew and wanted - and didn't want - would make for straitjacket software. Markusallen, I wish us both luck.

PS My name LongtimeFan applies to Mozilla generally. I chose it before I downloaded Thunderbird.

Markusallen: I think 'drag and drop' will work, and it takes no more time than it does to move or copy folders from one directory to another. No virus issues because I'm moving stuff from on place on my laptop to another. Is that your situation, too? Anyway I just tried it with one of my old email subdirectories: an outbox from a random year with one folder for each month. Here's what I did. First, I wondered where is Mail being kept. I right-clicked on Local Folders in the left column on the main Thunderbird App screen and then clicked on Settings. For me, Local Folders is in C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\weirdstuff.default\Mail\Local Folders. Thunderbird's window then let me choose BROWSE and that opened an Explorer-like window for Local Folders. I opened another Explorer Window of my own and copied my YYYY.out subdirectory to Local Folders. I was told to restart Thunderbird and did and voila! there were the 12 monthly folders listed. I could open any of them and get the message list and click on a message and read it. It's not so great having the folders directly on the screen instead of the parent directory so my next step is to find out whether Thunderbird supports a directory tree in Local Folders. If so, then with Windows Explorer I can move everything into where I want it and I can read it on Thunderbird and maybe search, forward, etc. Hope that helps.

Oops. Make sure you back up that email first. Thunderbird may destroy it all. It does bad things if you try to have a directory with subs. I guess that's a separate question. It only wants to display the folders of one directory. It may combine a group into one batch and then destroys them all. Markusallen, if you learn anything, please post!

@longtimefan.

Funny how I just say use this add-on, you provide a load of instructions and gochas and other things to watch out for. It is not arrogance, much as you would like to think it is. It is knowing that drag and drop if flakey for whatever reasons. That the ubiquitous anti virus is mostly stealing around 25% of the processing capacity of the device it is installed on and that most people seeking support do not have much in the way of technical skills to fall back on when it all goes pear shaped.

Just like you offer a generic warning about sub folders. Is it that you do not know the issue is IMAP mail server related, or you choose to simplify for the masses. Or is it a specific issue relating just to you?:

I read your post here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1213568 I bet you are drag and dropping and not using the recursive folder reading and importing abilities of the import export tools add-on. But that ios as close as I will go to your topic. You have made it very clear you do not want help unless it is on your terms. They are unacceptable to me.

Thanks. I apologize. You're right and I'm wrong. But even now, re-reading "No I did not miss it, I chose to ignore it." it's off-putting for a me-too like me and appears to have driven away the author of the original post, too. I also apologize for making an incorrect assumption. I was the arrogant one there: I glanced at the link you gave and just assumed it would get me to a web version of the complete list of add-ons under Import/Expert available within Thunderbird which I'd browsed already and not seen anything relevant. You may have directed marcusallen to a great add-on but now I don't need it: I've uninstalled Thunderbird. As to "IMAP mail server related"? I'm not sure how that relates to my and marcusallen's problem since we want to have our own old folder tree available to the email software. Since it's _our_ stuff, long since vetted for viruses, I'm not sure how moving it around _our_ directories - including the ones maintained for email - triggers any virus software. But I may be woefully ignorant there. Some day, to solve problems of other users, Thunderbird may attend to de-flaking drag-and-drop but I can't wait for that. Nor did I want to download a tool that may also embody the mindset that prevents users doing anything other than what the software writers (a group not known for diversity) want for themselves. I've now got Alpine on my laptop. Voila! I moved my enormous tree of old email to Alpine's 'mail' in the usual time it takes to move 0.7Gb, and I do have active virus protection. Now my messages from long ago are viewable, searchable, movable, deletable, etc. Thanks again for trying to help, though. I really appreciate it -- retroactively!

Congratulations I hope you enjoy your use of Alpine I had a command line mail client about 30 years ago from Wang.

emClient The Bat! MailBird Outlook

I would have though they would all be good choices on Windows.