Archiving mail locally

edwardp

As to the bug report @WildEnte noted above, it shows Resolved / Fixed.

jafaro

Thanks a lot!

lesk

Hi again.

Today I sat down to test if archiving old mail by moving them to an offline account work for me (Vivaldi 6.2.3105.48 on Linux). I didn't. Here's what I did.

Created a fresh email account (gmx.net) and filled it with a handful of emails
Set up M3 to fetch emails via IMAP from this new account with success, that is: M3 downloads new mails from this account. Let's call this "the online account".
Created a second account in M3, this one with a bogus (made-up/non-existing) email address, created as a "local account" and with a checkmark for "take account offline". Let's call this "the offline account".
Moved some mails from the online account to the offline account by selecting mail, right-clicking and selecting "move > move from online account > offline account".

At first glance, this works:

The moved mails are shown in the inbox of the offline account.
They also appear in the All Messages > Received view. This view actually did not change at all, which is as I hoped it would be.

The problem is this: The moved emails are not deleted from the server. I checked deleting emails from the online account, which works fine, that is: the deleted mail disappear from the server (I can check via the webmail interface of the server).

So it seems I have created a situation where M3 and the server are not in sync (although connected via the IMAP protocol). Which means I cannot use this to archive mail to free up space on the server.

Am I missing something?
Is this approach (archiving in an offline account) working for somebody else?

best wishes
kai

WildEnte

@lesk I can confirm the behavior you describe and have logged it as bug VB-112979. I would also find it more logical to have the email removed from the online account.

yojimbo274064400

@lesk,

Not sure a local account is suited for such a task as no additional local folders can be created in it, i.e. only has an Inbox and Sent folder.

BTW, is there a reason why you are not running the current stable release (7.0.3495.29)?

WildEnte

@yojimbo274064400 In Vivaldi, there aren't local folders anywhere, so it's really no difference.

yojimbo274064400

@WildEnte,

You are correct; my mistake, sorry. This should not however distract from the point that a local account is ill-suited to the task

lesk

@WildEnte Thanks for filing a bug report! I really wish I could figure out a way to archive mails, keep them part of "All Messages" and free up server space.

@yojimbo274064400 I wasn't aware that my vivaldi was updated, I thought I had it set up to automatically update. Will fix that asap. Thanks!

mossman

@lesk said in Archiving mail locally:

Is this approach (archiving in an offline account) working for somebody else?

I recently had to adopt the same approach when Outlook stopped allowing POP3 access.

I encountered several problems (can't migrate an account from POP3 to IMAP, can't create a second account with the same mail address), including the fact that "moving" mail between accounts really didn't work properly at all (messages were allegedly moved yet most files remained in the storage of the original POP3 account which I wished to delete, indexing went screwy despite rebuilding the database and reindexing multiple times).

I was worried I was going to lose a lot of mail, so eventually I gave up doing it through the UI and simply copied all the messages to another location, deleted the accounts, created an offline account and a new IMAP account then imported all the messages back to the offline account.

So now, like you, I use the offline account to archive old mail and will try to move mail from the IMAP account to the offline account every now and then (the monthly backup). I haven't done it yet since I like to leave a few months of mail on the server, but I will probably have to do it next time. I'll try through the UI and if that doesn't work I'll be manually exporting/deleting/importing again.

tcltk

@mossman said in Archiving mail locally:

and simply copied all the messages to another location, deleted the accounts, created an offline account and a new IMAP account then imported all the messages back to the offline account.

This is quite interesting and could save me lots of efforts. I have two questions :

Are you using the following menu path to import your emails : File/Import from applications or files .../Mail files/etc
to make your import ?
In Vivaldi directories, mails are sorted by account/years/moths/days . Is the original structure restored ( Inbox,Sent,Spam .. specific directories.. ) or are they all packed in one directory ? Something close to the *.mbs format of Opera M2.

mossman

@tcltk said in Archiving mail locally:

@mossman said in Archiving mail locally:

and simply copied all the messages to another location, deleted the accounts, created an offline account and a new IMAP account then imported all the messages back to the offline account.

This is quite interesting and could save me lots of efforts. I have two questions :

Are you using the following menu path to import your emails : File/Import from applications or files .../Mail files/etc
to make your import ?

In Vivaldi directories, mails are sorted by account/years/moths/days . Is the original structure restored ( Inbox,Sent,Spam .. specific directories.. ) or are they all packed in one directory ? Something close to the *.mbs format of Opera M2.

menu -> File -> Import from Applications or Files -> Imports from: Mail files -> [select source files and destination mail account]
the new files, if all are imported as they were originally stored, are EXACTLY like the old files - they will be in the same date-based filetree and have almost exactly the same contents. The only tiny differences will be in the file numbering and maybe an index number in the mail header. That was actually useful since I could look for missing mails by checking the number of files in the (sub)directories (see below)

Unfortunately, however, the exporting/importing is not very straightforward. I encountered the following when I did it last October:

surprisingly, Vivaldi did not let me select a file directory and just import everything from all the included subdirectories - I had to select individual files for import (this might be a limitation of the library they use for the file dialogue in Windows). That meant I had to move all my copied message files to a single location in batches of (I think) 1000 mails, select them all in the dialogue box, import, then move, select, import, move, select, import etc. for the rest of the afternoon...
I think I did some more manual sorting to get sent mail to be in the sent folder (by filtering as from:[my mail address] then using the UI to move from inbox to sent). IIRC it didn't happen automatically. I considered importing messages into sent but I think I used the UI instead. It would have been easier, except...
surprisingly, Vivaldi still has no way to export mail! If it did, then the whole thing would have been as simple as selecting inbox messages for say 1 year, exporting, then sent for that year, exporting, etc. Importing would have been MUCH easier in that case!

There were a few discrepancies between the imported and original mails, especially when mailing lists sent messages to two of my addresses or when I sent myself a test mail - these differences showed up when I used the file-count trick I mentioned above. But I believe everything is probably imported correctly. I kept the old storage filetree in a backup, just in case.

But without a proper export method or the ability to import everything by selecting the directory instead of files, you will need to be good at bulk moving and copying files in your OS. Vivaldi should handle this better!

tcltk

@mossman

Thanks so much for your time and detailed explanation ! I try to save my emails once a year, essentially for work. Sometimes I have to come back 10 years backwards to find the history of what happened, sometimes on two different accounts. So, trimming as you explained is not very secured.
I will continue the way I use : simply zipping the whole Vivaldi standalone installation and renaming it with a date range, removing the emails from the server (then, up to now unzipping without Internet connexion, I never tested "Take account offline" when I need to search inside ) .

Concerning import/export Opera M2 with its mbs format was perfect : Let's I have to find a sender in 10 years :

with *.mbs files I just ask Notepad++ to grep this sender in those files which are text files.
with Vivaldi I need to unzip then search in each unzipped directory using Vivaldi interface or using Notepad++ but which is long since there are tons of files.

The ultimate advantage of *.mbs is that they are universal text files when I am not sure that Vivaldi 5.x, 6.x ... will still work in 10 years.

mossman

@tcltk I'm a bit confused... Vivaldi message files are the same plain-text raw message format as Opera's were...

tcltk

@mossman ; I understand, I neglicted one step. In my account I have a directory "save" or "archive" where I put all incoming and outcoming mails and did a right click "save as mbs file". So this unique file contained all the emails but in one place only. It is easier to maintain than dozens or even hundreds of separated messages.

mossman

@tcltk actually, I thought you might mean the multi-message files but wasn't sure. Opera used to keep one month in one file but later switched to Vivaldi's one message per file style.

Exporting multiple messages in one file (and being able to import these) is what Vivaldi needs to implement - together with the ability to pick a directory to import all files from all its subdirectories.

RalfKerkhoff

The only reason i use thunderbird from time to time on my Linux machine is the abiltiy to store mails in local folders.

For my dails work i only use vivaldi.
So, yes it would be great to have a feature like "archive to local folders" in Vivaldi.

spindreams

This is absolutely the only reason I am still using Thunderbird, I have to have some way to easily archive old email to local storage, I have 8 email accounts all getting 100s of email per day and simply leaving years of old mail on the server is not an option from both a cost (Server space costs money) and secure backup perspective (I need to keep old emails for backup and it is much easier to do that from my local PC to my NAS then rely on my hosts crappy backups options), also local email searching is much faster.