TBird Set Up - Getting it right the first time (Keep some, but not all email on server, while keeping all email locally)
Hello! I want to set up TBird to: 1) Get all my messages and attachments stored locally, and... 2) Remove *most* of the above from gmail's server to avoid the data limit, but... 3) Keep, perhaps some months or a year of activity on gmail's server so I can access recent items from wherever.
Questions: 1) I have 10s of thousands (more?) of msgs, many with attachments. Is it better to just set up TBIrd and let it grab all the messages, or start by using Google TakeOut? 2) I presume I use IMAP vs. POP? 3) To preserve messages on my harddrive, I could archive to a local folder. Then I could safely delete those same messages on the gmail web interface? 4) If this turns into a disaster, can I just remove the entire account from TBird without suffering a loss of my entire email history? 5) Any insurance maneuvers to prevent the disaster of accidentally losing my entire email history while attempting to set this up? (Obviously will need to be religious about backing up my own system, though keeping a year of email on the gmail server offers a bit of insurance once the set up is successful.)
I am really hoping to avoid creating a unholy mess of my email/spending a week trying to fix it. (Indeed, I have avoided this project for years for this reason, but I really, really want to do this.)
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My suggestion:
- keep IMAP to ensure all remains accessible from wherever
- for archiving, I suggest this:
- set up local folder for each archive
- select and copy messages to be archived and removed from server to the new local folder
- check to verify that you have both content and header of the new archive in the new folder
- now, you can delete from server
- repeat the above four steps for each archive.
Specifically, do not use the thunderbird archive feature. use your own archiving setup, as suggested above. AND, be religious on backups.
To be clear, you are recommending AGAINST the archive process described in the link below, even if I configure it to archive to a local folder? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/archived-messages
Any thoughts on using Google Takeout or not?
Thank you!
That's right; although there may be better approaches than mine, not losing messages is my top priority, and by manually controlling it, you avoid abdicating it to Thunderbird. That works ok for POP, but IMAP is a different animal. I confess to total ignorance on google takeout. Also, my approach is my personal strategy; some may say I am wrong, but I see too many people losing messages from IMAP downloads where they end up with just the headers. ..
I'm in the midst of the same process. I have Google Takeout, and have fiddled with it some, but am not presently trying to use it for this process; mostly because when I succeed getting things properly set up using Thunderbird with IMAP everything will be synchronized (except for the old messages that still need to be deleted from the Gmail All Mail folder); by using takeout I could get everything where I want it in Local Folders, but then I'd still need to clean up Gmail. (To use Takeout you need to import mbox files.) (On my setup it only took something like 20 hours or so to start from scratch and fully synchronize with Gmail.)
I'm still trying to understand the differences in the Thunderbird archive setup choices- so far I have not found an explanation that (to my mind) sufficiently explains the difference between ["Archives" Folder on:] and [Other:]. (Perhaps the only difference is the presence of a top level folder named "Archives"?)
I am exploring whether the Import Export Tools NG Extension will prove useful.
One thing I have read is that the Thunderbird Archive process is manually driven - since I also have thousands of messages in my history I'm looking for a tool that is somewhat automated. (Here is where I agree with David - not losing messages remains the top priority.)
So far, my takeaway from this convo is that this isn't going to work, if for no other reason that I won't be able to reasonably expect to select tens of thousands of emails and both quickly (ish) and safely archive them. Is that right?
is there way to take a completely different tactic, and download all my messages, then somehow sever that connection to gmail (thus preserving all messages), then set up a second T-Bird instance of the same gmail account to use to delete messages/view any new messages from that point going forward?
Has anyone found a good method (perhaps with a different client?) to do what I'm trying to do? (ie - download all messages, then delete most from server but keep all messages locally, thus vastly reducing the amount of data on the gmail server?