Retrieving Old Google Mail
While a long-time user of Thunderbird, I only discovered a few months ago that I could successfully front-end my GMail account. For several decades I collected and collated all my mail from the several different POP servers I've used, but did not know that Thunderbird could treat the IMAP-based Google mail server as if POP.
So, for the past several months, I have been very, very happy to have my GMail recent email traffic integrated with the others.
What I have not discovered how to accomplish is the retrieval of a trove of some rather important emails exchanged and retained on the GMail server from about 2012 through 2021. I know that I could forward those emails to one of my other POP accounts and they would be sent to my Thunderbird front end as newly-arrived emails and I will do that if there is no way to achieve what I would actually like to achieve which would be the ability to coerce the server and client into treating the old emails as fresh, so that I could receive and catalog them without the distorted history that would appertain by forwarding them -- showing up as forwarded from rather than sent from the original parties and carrying a modern date rather than the historically-correct one.
Coercing the server side into restoring the old emails to an UnRead state does not have the desired effect. Any suggestion from anyone who has faced a similar conundrum and solved it would be much appreciated.
Chosen solution
My suggestion is that this allows selecting specific messages that are still on the server, whereas that is not a feature of POP. I suggest COPYing the messages to a local folder or within a POP folder to ensure that the messages are retained on your PC. Do not use MOVE to achieve that.
Read this answer in context 👍 1All Replies (4)
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you could create an IMAP account alongside and then download and save those particular messages in unread status. If that doesn't work, please share more of your specifics. Thank you.
If I understand your suggestion, it means that I should create a new Thunderbird account pointing to GMail, but follow the instructions for considering it to be an IMAP server. If that is, indeed, a workaround that would allow me to retrieve the old emails, it will solve my problem. The total objective/value of my Thunderbird front-end is that I can merge traffic irrespective of via which mail service the traffic was sent or received, then save the material [which includes a good deal of attachments] in local category hierarchies organized to support searches.
What your suggestion does not specifically state, but you seem to have the expertise to know, is where the state machine is maintained that is telling Thunderbird, when I click on "Get Messages" whether or not some ancient message has been sent/received or not. Maintenance of that state on the client side seems possible, but somewhat worse than if the protocols were written for the server to maintain that state, but as written above, the only state I can manipulate when logged into Google Mail is that which records whether or not I have read the incoming.
So, I will try to set up a separate IMAP-based connection to GMail on the Thunderbird side and reset the Read switch on the server side and cross my fingers. Thanks very much for the suggestion.
Chosen Solution
My suggestion is that this allows selecting specific messages that are still on the server, whereas that is not a feature of POP. I suggest COPYing the messages to a local folder or within a POP folder to ensure that the messages are retained on your PC. Do not use MOVE to achieve that.
I have been able to retrieve that decade of threaded mail traffic preserving the dates that are used as part of my search criteria when using my Thunderbird archives.
After cataloging the 100-some-odd emails in my hierarchy of Local Folders, I will delete one or the other of the now-redundant POP and IMAP interfaces to GMail.
Thank you so much for your assistance.
You must log in to your account to reply to posts. Please start a new question, if you do not have an account yet.