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Moving a huge number of folders from Local Folders to IMAP email accont

chris.palmer
chris.palmer
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I am trying to help move an email account which was POP onto IMAP so they can have their emails on a couple of other devices other than their desktop. The issue is they have hundreds of folders in their local folders. I have setup their IMAP and have tried to copy over a few folders at a time onto the IMAP account, however I find that Thunderbird struggles with copying them and there are just so many that I can see myself getting in to trouble in a minute with duplicate folders in both locations.

I thought of a work around which appeared to work where I went into the Thunderbird profile for the user and copied the email folders from the local folders onto the newly created IMAP account. I then opened Thunderbird up in "Offline" mode and checked all the emails were there. They were which was great however as soon as I went online all the folders disappeared. I am guessing that this is the server overriding the local email client. How can I stop this happening and force the server to mirror what is showing on Thunderbird?

I am trying to help move an email account which was POP onto IMAP so they can have their emails on a couple of other devices other than their desktop. The issue is they have hundreds of folders in their local folders. I have setup their IMAP and have tried to copy over a few folders at a time onto the IMAP account, however I find that Thunderbird struggles with copying them and there are just so many that I can see myself getting in to trouble in a minute with duplicate folders in both locations. I thought of a work around which appeared to work where I went into the Thunderbird profile for the user and copied the email folders from the local folders onto the newly created IMAP account. I then opened Thunderbird up in "Offline" mode and checked all the emails were there. They were which was great however as soon as I went online all the folders disappeared. I am guessing that this is the server overriding the local email client. How can I stop this happening and force the server to mirror what is showing on Thunderbird?

Chosen solution

See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1400416

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1331879

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All Replies (4)

david
david
  • Top 10 Contributor
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That is a difficult issue to do, as I see many attempts and no one has had good success that I have seen. This is not a Thunderbird issue, but an IMAP structure issue. Copying a small number of messages at a time usually works, and one approach that had good success was to create a filter to do the move, as that slows the process a bit. I suggest reviewing a sample of messages after the transfer to verify completeness.

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chris.palmer
chris.palmer Question owner
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Thanks for the info David. I was a little worried that this maybe the case. I will look at a message filter though as a possible work around.

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sfhowes
sfhowes
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Chosen Solution

See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1400416

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1331879

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chris.palmer
chris.palmer Question owner
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Thanks for these links. This worked for me. I ran up a spare VM and installed a old version of Thunderbird (v78) which would allow me to install the add-on for moving folders between local folders and the IMAP account. The next part was optional but useful, I made a copy of the profile so that the user could continue to use their emails on the original profile. I then went into the copy profile on Thunderbird 78 and copied all the folders onto the IMAP account. Once done I asked the user to confirm that all the folders they needed were present on the IMAP email account and once confirmed deleted the copy of the profile. All that was left was for the user to delete the original folders from their 'local folders'. Thanks again for the help on this.

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