a better way to store & manage messages?
Hi! This is more of a discussion than an problem to be solved right away.
I have my own data structure in a specific partition/disk. Microsoft tries to impose its own structure somewhere in C:\users but I resist! Now mail systems, including Thunderbird have their own storage system. I then have to recreate my structure there and transfer any changes made in my main structure.
It makes it bothersome indeed to work on specific subjects which include text, letters, downloads, sheet AND mails. it would be super to merge both structures into one: e.g; - auto copy main structure to mail structure and - auto transfer mail to main structure (without touching the mail files as they seem to be an international standard).
It would solve a very awkward problem with these "c:\users\me\appdata\roaming\thunderbird\abcdefgh.default\mail" business which are absolutely impossible to merge with other such files, quite a problem when you change computers (I work on two computers with one hard disk for data)
Any bright developper on that? I won't have a try being a tropical agronomist and on nthe other side of the fence: a plain but steady uses!
Thanks for any initiative!
All Replies (5)
To have your profile else were is not hard. You can set it up in profile-manager. But the file "c:\users\me\appdata\roaming\thunderbird\profiles.ini" must exist as it contains the path to where your profile is stored. With a copy of profiles.ini on both pc's it should (?) work.
Maybe you will have problem with cache. Some are stored under c:\users\me\appdata\local\thunderbird
To start Profile manager: start Thunderbird from RUN (windows-key+R) with Thunderbird -P
Modified by Gnospen
Thanks Gnospen , To operate as said you have to view : - hidden elements to see "appdata" - file extension to have the proper name I'll have a go and report later (busy now saving my data)
But that does not answer the more difficult (?) idea of automatically merging mail and data structures and files! but that is for developpers. No hurry I'm used to it
Have a good week
It's fairly easy to extract individual email messages from Thunderbird to store elsewhere. The main problem in doing so, IMHO, is that once you do this you lose all the chaining and threading of related messages.
If you extract them as .eml files, then an attempt to open one would most likely launch Thunderbird to do so. That means that it would be easy to do further email-related work with them. But not so easy to search them when looking for material related to some specific topic.
Conversely, if you saved them as man-readable files (HTML?) they'd be trivial to search, but harder to use in an email context.
Thanks Zenos, This is just what I do: copy .eml as .txt, and attached docs, to my "human" dir. Or just the attached as it may happen. But that is cumbersome, particularly when working in a hurry with my big fingers :-(
What I propose is that someone (not me by all means) writes an add-on to - copy the human structure to the eml one or 'vice versa'; - copies the attached to the proper place in the human structure; - copies the .eml as .txt to the same if OK
Discussion is on! Good week
EDIT Redrawing my answer
Modified by Gnospen