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Question about Thurnderbird

R

rlk

Bronze Member
I have been using Thunderbird for my email client for years. Consequently I have a lot of old emails that I would like to migrate to CDs or DVDs. The emails are typical emails containing attachments (word documents, excel documents, PDF files, jpg files, etc.)

I just tried to print an entire email folder to a PDF file, but unfortunately, it generated a separate PDF file for each email, plus it did not print the attached files. That's not what I want as some folders have hundreds of emails, and I want to have access to the attachments also.

So, does anyone know how to:

a. move the email folders to cd/dvd/external hard drive such that I can access or reference them in the future

b. print all emails in the folder to one pdf file, including all attachments

Thanks, Bob
 
Dang, that's a tough one Bob. I can't help solve this one as I use a totally different way of doing things.
If an email has anything I want to keep for posterity I do one of three things. Save it in a .doc file (if formatted text is involved) save it in a text file or save the image / pics. If pics and text are included I'll add the pics to the word document to keep them all together. And I keep these in a year folder so I have some from 08, 09 etc. I hate saving that stuff in my email as I had issues getting stuff out of an email archive email years ago so i decided to do without them.
 
Thanks for the reply Doc.

I understand your method, however, I think it would be very time consuming to go through several year's of emails and save them as you stated. If I start out a new year doing it your way (where I am able to spread the effort over the year) then I can see your idea would work well.

I'm still looking for a way to archive the emails to a CD/DVD/external hard drive.

Bob
 
I have mine saved to an old PC downstairs. I tried doing the same thing in Netscape and never got beyond backing them up on a hard drive and re-importing them into Netscape. You might have some luck on the Thunderbird help forum. Lots of gurus on there.
 
I don't know if this will work for you with Thunderbird or not. At work I use Outlook and have to dump my emails a lot because of server space. I just drag them over to a folder on my computer desktop. They are saved as an eml extension. As long as I have Outlook on the computer I can always open them later on.

edit...........I just tried it here at home using Outlook Express and it works just fine for me. Try dragging them over to an external hard drive and see what happens.
 
OhioTC18 said:
I don't know if this will work for you with Thunderbird or not. At work I use Outlook and have to dump my emails a lot because of server space. I just drag them over to a folder on my computer desktop. They are saved as an eml extension. As long as I have Outlook on the computer I can always open them later on.

edit...........I just tried it here at home using Outlook Express and it works just fine for me. Try dragging them over to an external hard drive and see what happens.
Click to expand...

My wife just tried this and it would not work with Thurderbird.

Good suggestion though. Thanks.

Bob
 
OhioTC18 said:
I don't know if this will work for you with Thunderbird or not. At work I use Outlook and have to dump my emails a lot because of server space. I just drag them over to a folder on my computer desktop. They are saved as an eml extension. As long as I have Outlook on the computer I can always open them later on.

edit...........I just tried it here at home using Outlook Express and it works just fine for me. Try dragging them over to an external hard drive and see what happens.
Click to expand...

rlk said:
My wife just tried this and it would not work with Thurderbird.

Good suggestion though.

Bob
Click to expand...

As it turns out, something similar to this will work with Thunderbird. The test my wife did was to try to drag a folder from inside Thunderbird. That did not work, however, we found out that we can highlight all the emails in a folder, then choose to save them as an eml file.

You select the folder where you want to save the emails, and presto, they appear in the folder. In my case, I chose to save them on an external hard drive.

The only negative I found is that when you sort the new file by subject, the FW: and RE: tags get sorted, so same subject emails are not kept together. Inside Windows Explorer though you can search for the subject you want.

When you find the email you want, you can double click it, and magically it opens in Thunderbird.

This solved my problem of how to back up/preserve my email files.

Thanks for the suggestion TC.

Bob
 
No problem, glad I could help a little. Yes even doing it in Outlook and Outlook Express, you can lose track of some follow up emails unless you rename them.
 
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