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Creating local mailbox files to organize emails

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  • Last reply by gp

TrogdorMenoo
TrogdorMenoo
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I moved all my operations from Outlook to Firefox. I have 20 different email accounts that I work with. In Outlook I was able to create a different local PST file (not on the server) broken down by email account and year. e.g.

  • 2020 email A
  • 2021 email A
  • 2019 email B
  • 2020 email B
  • 2021 email B

This made it really easy to manage mailbox size constraints and to move over older emails to an archive by dragging/dropping into a local PST. Also, as long as the local PSTs were added to the list of mailboxes in Outlook, they were all searchable. This allowed me to search all emails for the last 15 years.

I can't seem to be able to do any of this in Thunderbird anymore. I didn't see anything obvious to set up an equivalent workflow. I noticed that Thunderbird seems to save things in directories, but it seems to put them in an obscure place and I can't figure out how to make it work for what I've been doing for 2 decades.

I moved all my operations from Outlook to Firefox. I have 20 different email accounts that I work with. In Outlook I was able to create a different local PST file (not on the server) broken down by email account and year. e.g. * 2020 email A * 2021 email A * 2019 email B * 2020 email B * 2021 email B This made it really easy to manage mailbox size constraints and to move over older emails to an archive by dragging/dropping into a local PST. Also, as long as the local PSTs were added to the list of mailboxes in Outlook, they were all searchable. This allowed me to search all emails for the last 15 years. I can't seem to be able to do any of this in Thunderbird anymore. I didn't see anything obvious to set up an equivalent workflow. I noticed that Thunderbird seems to save things in directories, but it seems to put them in an obscure place and I can't figure out how to make it work for what I've been doing for 2 decades.

All Replies (1)

gp
gp
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Hello,

well the 'obscure place' is in a Mail subdirectory of the mail account, the mail account location you can find by using (among other possibilities) Help / more troubleshooting and clicking about:profiles in 'Application basics'. It don't matter much because global search works whatever your mail account disk location is. The subdirectories of 'Mail' are your Pop3 accounts (if you have Imap accounts, they are under 'ImapMail').

Note that you can setup a custom location for your profile if you want (such as 'D:\mail' for example) by editing the profiles.ini file in c:\users\yourname\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird, if you set an absolute path you have to change IsRelative to 0, and you have to generally think of what you are doing by copying the existing profile to the new location if you don't want to configure everything again. Example (not applicable immediately since it's for a Linux system):

[Profile0] Name=default IsRelative=0 Path=/shared/Mail Default=1

[General] StartWithLastProfile=1 Version=2

This is not something where you should do adventurous changes, backup the Profiles.ini file before changing it and don't move the existing profile, copy it so you can revert everything immediately.