Thunderbird 85.0b3 (64-bit) on Windows 7 (64 bit), fully up to date.
Hi all.
I have a well-aged Thunderbird profile (20+ years) that I need to now migrate from a POP conf… (read more)
Thunderbird 85.0b3 (64-bit) on Windows 7 (64 bit), fully up to date.
Hi all.
I have a well-aged Thunderbird profile (20+ years) that I need to now migrate from a POP configuration to an IMAP. I've been whacking away at this for a couple days now and just want my email back. Actually I do have my email as I've made MozBackups pretty regularly including just before I entered this nightmare. I just want to be able to send and receive email again.
I've seen the page here for this kind of migration but it apparently assumes you have a couple emails to migrate, not a couple hundred...folders.
A profile this large also presents the issue of IMAP synchronization which I'm not interested in, but which is apparently the default when you first start it up. I don't need more than a week of mail stored on a server. Actually I don't need any stored there, I never use webmail. I just want the email to be received on the server and passed to me for my sorting. Maybe if I'm out of town for a time it'd be nice to be able to webmail for the latest mail.
I assume I can probably migrate my address book, but it seems clear all the filters I've created will not. That's fine, I don't mind redoing those.
That's the background, here's what I've done:
1.) Found out when TBird probes Spectrum for the correct config it retrieves those for mobile.charter.net so that means a manual config for me. Also found out Spectrum won't accept an SSL SMTP connection (the port # is correct), going by their instructions. Downloading will accept SSL though.
2.) Once my IMAP profile was created and tested, I shut down TBird. Extracted my POP profile from MozBackup's archive with 7Zip to a temporary directory and copied all the folders and files into the new IMAP directory (all that represented email folders, not config-type files).
3.) Started up TBird and the sync fun began. I'm an 24 year IT guy but never delved into email issues too much so it took me a bit to find how to shut that down and grok what IMAP was all about.
Other:
For some reason I don't show "Local Folders" in the application, but I do see them in my profile directory, but under the Mail folder, not the ImapMail folder where my Inbox, Sent, etc folders are. That would be a better place for all these older folders I keep around, I know. But alas, I can't get them to show up in TBird.
I thought I had it briefly but every time I opened TBird it prompted me to do a purge that would save 6 GB of space, which I canceled. Then suddenly it started just deleting folders without a prompt after 2 or 3 restarts.
I'm ready to totally uninstall and fresh reinstall TBird at this point. My original (bloated, I know) profile is backed up but again, it's a POP profile being imposed on a new IMAP (with no desire to store anything remotely).
Thanks if you got this far.
Any advice?