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Import Gmail mbox archive in Thunderbird

  • 11 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 133 views
  • Last reply by christ1

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HI, I read former posts re problems importing Gmail *.mbox archives into Thunderbird (9GB; not compressed, is readable by commandline "more") .

The following steps have been done:

After copying mbox file to Thunderbird "local folder" place, no messages show up.

Same problem has been described before but my archive is NOT compressed. How to proceed? Thanks a lot for your help christian

HI, I read former posts re problems importing Gmail *.mbox archives into Thunderbird (9GB; not compressed, is readable by commandline "more") . The following steps have been done: After copying mbox file to Thunderbird "local folder" place, no messages show up. Same problem has been described before but my archive is NOT compressed. How to proceed? Thanks a lot for your help christian

Modified by Matt

Chosen solution

I'd still be careful with mail files greater than 4 GB.

In any case, when your problem has been fixed, can you mark the thread as 'Solved' please? Thank you.

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All Replies (11)

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make your archive less than 4Gb is the first step.

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Hi Matt, I split the file in 3 parts, all considerably smaller than 4GB (around 3 GB), put one in the thunderbird local folder place. To no avail. Same result as before. What else can I do?

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Please provide the full path where you copy the mbox file to, including the name of the file.

Note, you'll need to do this while Thunderbird is closed.

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This is the path:

C:\Users\braun\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\813pg5a5.default\Mail\Local Folders

and these are the 2 files in there (from 2 because altogether almost 10GB): Alle E-Mails einschließlich Spam-Nachrichten und E-2_1.mbox (3.1 GB) Alle E-Mails einschließlich Spam-Nachrichten und E-2_2.mbox (3.1Gb)

Both are ASCII files, no compression Thanks for your help Christian

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Sorry, from 3 files altogether because I was told, the mbox-file should not exceed 4GB.

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Alle E-Mails einschließlich Spam-Nachrichten und E-2_1.mbox

What a crap file name is this? Mbox files don't have a file extension. Try something simple, e.g. like 'E-2_1' (without the quotation marks).

Upon restarting Thunderbird, there should then be a folder E-2_1 underneath Local Folders.

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Hi Chris, this name has been made by the Gmail Archiving Process, but it is not a name problem because the folder with this name appears in "local Folders". It is just only empty!

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Tried it again with short name. It worked! Great thanks. A lot!

Can one also restore the folder structure from before in Gmail? Now everything is in one big bucket :-)

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I suppose you'd need to manually re-create the folder structure and move messages manually to their designated folders. But then I never downloaded my message archive from Google, and I have no idea how they organize the download. May be what you get is just the 'All Mail' folder. If in doubt, ask Google.

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After this, I tried the original 9GB file again with a short name: It works too.

There is no limitation on 4GB on mbox files as Matt has mentioned.

Thanks again, you helped me access all my professional emails again!

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Chosen Solution

I'd still be careful with mail files greater than 4 GB.

In any case, when your problem has been fixed, can you mark the thread as 'Solved' please? Thank you.