Import Local files from Thunderbird
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I'm considering moving to Vivaldi email from Thunderbird, and I'm trying to work through some of the differences.
Having had email accounts for almost 20 years, I have a ton of saved emails. Most of these I keep in deeply nested Local files under Thunderbird (Windows 11). (Some of the saved emails are from accounts I no longer have, so I can't use IMAP with those.) I can't figure out how to import these local email files into Vivaldi while retaining the information in those nested directory names.
Vivaldi doesn't like folders, even calling them "Evil." I haven't been converted yet, but I'm willing to try this new way of living. But how do I retain the information in the directory names?
I guess the New Way is to use tags. Fine, I could do that, but I'd want to automagically convert folder structure like
Accounts/Medical
Accounts/Airlines
into tags like
<Accounts> <Medical>
<Accounts> <Airlines>
for each separate email in the respective directories. Is there a way to do that?The other half of the problem is that I have hundreds of subdirectories. I don't want to have to import each subdirectory individually, but afaict Vivaldi's import mechanism doesn't allow that--it only knows how to import individual files, not all the files in nested directories. Am I wrong?
McSwell -
@mcswell2001 said in Import Local files from Thunderbird:
Vivaldi doesn't like folders, even calling them "Evil.
Ah that's just me, not Vivaldi. I don't work for the company and that opinion is my very own one. Also, I appreciate that everyone's preference is different. If you're happy with folders, then that's what's good for you! I don't need to win an argument here, I just want to get people thinking
Folder support is gradually expanded in Vivaldi, but so far it doesn't know local folders, only the ones on IMAP servers.
If all those emails are local folders, it's probably not useful to change to a tagging/labeling system before moving to Vivaldi. Labels are synced via servers, but so far I haven't seen any import get them transferred properly from any local client to any other. I have found a recent thread in the Mozilla thunderbird forum that also makes me give up hope that there's any non-cumbersome way to tag mails by their folder name.
Back when I last tested import/export it left the impression that the best way to import complicated structures from Thunderbird into Vivaldi when no IMAP server is available was to do a detour over Opera Mail M2 (the spiritual predecessor of Vivaldi Mail, which was abandoned by Opera around 2014 or so). BUT in any case, this would mean jumping through a lot of hoops.
I'm going to test some things using Thunderbird local folders and Vivaldi and possibly Opera M2 out of interest (I have to have some hobby...). Not sure if there's going to be a working recipe coming out of that ever.
But right now I think your best move is to keep thunderbird as the storage for old emails. Also for currently active accounts ... Thunderbird is a fine email client. There is no reason not to have it run concurrently with Vivaldi and just have the two in sync over IMAP.
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Yes, looks like I'll be keeping TBird as my client. Switching was a matter of screen real estate (I currently keep TBird and Vivaldi both open all the time), but until Vivaldi email implements a way to import from local files, I can continue the way I have without much pain :). (There were a couple other issues with Vivaldi email, but minor in comparison.)
That said, I don't know how Vivaldi labels its emails. If there were a way to label individual .eml files with tags and then import them, I could write a Python script to convert the directory paths of my local files into the tags and write them into each .eml file prior to importing them into an account (perhaps a fake email account, as someone suggested in another thread). But I'm guessing Vivaldi maintains the tags in some database, and cannot import them from the .eml file.
Mcswell
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@mcswell2001 said in Import Local files from Thunderbird:
That said, I don't know how Vivaldi labels its emails.
Labels (or flags, keywords) are defined in the RFC https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9051/
Essentially both client and server maintain a database detailing out everything they know about specific messages. Labels are not part of the header for all I know.Here's the best description I am aware of:
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/73130/are-labels-synced-with-mail-provider-in-some-sort-of-way/2?_=1730063432899 -
@WildEnte said:
I'm going to test some things using Thunderbird local folders and Vivaldi and possibly Opera M2 out of interest (I have to have some hobby...). Not sure if there's going to be a working recipe coming out of that ever.
But right now I think your best move is to keep thunderbird as the storage for old emails.
Any efforts you could make along those lines would be much appreciated. I've got nowhere with it. Although I now use M3 for IMAP access to extant accounts, I also have a significant store in T'Bird of POP-derived emails in an over-weight TB folder hierarchy under the Inbox of 'Local Folders' (to which all accounts have contributed). I don't create folders nowadays but let M3's views (and some Labels) do the work.
One complication is emails appearing in more than one TB folder due to content being relevant to more than one place in my folder hierarchy so the email was copied into each relevant folder.
Somewhat similarly, I always used threaded conversations (even though some correspondents seem to prefer composing a new email rather than using 'reply' to an email) so I'd configured TB to place a copy of any sent emails in the folder of the email to which I was replying as well as the Sent folder of the account from which I was sending. More duplication.
I've seen that an email no longer on the server would be marked as internal by M3 but retained and described as 'Local Copy'. I'd need to somehow ensure these could be readily re-introduced to M3. I've had problems before with .eml files within a Data Folder in my profile suddenly not being displayed in M3 when I've had to delete and re-create accounts: they remain in my Profile but these internal emails are no longer being picked-up by M3 when it's collecting from the server - and only the server..
Somewhat disappointing to have to retain TB for this purpose rather than integrate legacy emails into M3 as I'm also preparing to use V rather than TB/Lightning for calendar.
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@Society said in Import Local files from Thunderbird:
One complication is emails appearing in more than one TB folder due to content being relevant to more than one place in my folder hierarchy so the email was copied into each relevant folder
Yes, folders are evil
as my signature statesVivaldi would just retain one copy of that email and show it to you in the different places. "Virtual copies" might be a term to describe it (made up just now, not official).
The threading topic is a general nuisance, but again search is helping if the content is quoted. Keyword search is quite powerful with email. (It's what the force is to Jedi: totally inexplicable to people that don't have a knack for it)
I tried a way going via import to Opera first but that lost all the folder structure already in Opera, not what you want. I am looking at another idea sometime later this week if I get around to it.