
Saving emails and attachments to an external hard drive.
I downloaded Thunderbird to copy all my yahoo emails plus their attachments, and then taking all of those and saving them to an external hard drive. It took days but I think the first step was accomplished. How do I export all those emails (files, groups) with their attachments to a file on the external hard drive? My goal is to then delete all the emails from Yahoo, but still have the emails. I noticed that if I delete an email on Yahoo that was saved on Thunderbird, it is deleted from Thunderbird. I need Thunderbird to save all that it has. I want to clean the slate on yahoo, but need the emails for personal and business reasons. Respond to me as if I'm two years old -- not so computer literate. TIA
All Replies (2)
Why, oh why, do folk make life hard for themselves. Have you already read the information that yahoo do make available? https://help.yahoo.com/kb/download-email-yahoo-mail-third-party-sln28681.html
It is lacking in detail sadly and of a generally poor quality. But then so is just about everything about the service. Anecdotally it appears that mail from the server name mentioned only downloads and synchronization does not occur. This is reinforced by the last line on the page about two way syncing. I really do not know though and yahoo appears incapable of issuing anything resembling complete information.
IMAP is as you have demonstrated to yourself is syncronised to the server. Exactly what the service Yahoo offers does I do not know but as far as I can see it makes the mail sync server to client but not the other way. One things to be sure, unless you manually set the server names for the incoming server your account is currently not configured to use it so I suggest you change the server name and again wait for things to stabilize.
Now the next part is to one concerning me. Are you trying to make something you can access or are you only concerned to make sure you "have a copy" The fomats for the export you use will very much depend on your usage going forward.
However the tools you will use are the same. This addon https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools-ng/?src=ss
The import export tools addon offers many export formats, but perhaps the best for most archival work is the venerable MBOX format. That places each email in a folder in a single very large file. The downside being you have to import the folder to Thunderbird or another mail client that uses MBOX format to read the email.
You could export to hundreds of thousands of individual eml files. These can be read by double clicking them in a mail client, but the trouble is identifying which of the thousands and thousands of email you want to double click on.
The final option I will mention is to re-import MBOX files immediately to Thunderbird where you can access the folders in the local Folders account the same as you access them in the yahoo account now. BTW I have no idea how you delete thundreds of thousands of email from yahoo if the sync is one way/
Thank you Matt for responding. I am so unsavvy about programs, emails, internet, etc. I did reach out to expert help from Yahoo, and they told me to use Thunderbird. The expert said he didn't know what else to do, and that he could not help with Thunderbird. I also asked the Tech Geeks at Geek Squad, and they said the same. They suggested that I go through the thousands of emails and save and/or download any attachments separately. This would require literally hundreds of hours to accomplish. To answer your next comment about how I want to use the saved emails/attachments is this: I need to free up my Yahoo account because they are now charging me for it. I need to access past emails/attachments if I need to look up data for clients or for myself personally. So yes, I need to be able to access the info on them and thought I could do it by using Thunderbird. Any thoughts? Please be very simplistic in your answer and patient with me. I don't even know what IMAP is, why my yahoo is synchronizing with Thunderbird, etc. Many thanks.