Feature Request - Archive Thunderbird Mail Messages

wintogreen · Post by **wintogreen** » June 23rd, 2005, 2:55 pm

ausdilecce wrote:So are you saying that with the most current version ( 0.0.3 ) you are *still* required to restart TB in order to see folders that contain apostrophes and spaces ?

Sorry, I should have clarified that out of all my top-level folders (there are 14, plus the regular Inbox, Drafts, etc.), it was just those 2 that didn't appear in the folderpane until restarting. Many of the others also have spaces, parentheses, apostrophes, underlines, periods, Japanese, etc., but they all showed up. Guess i was just lucking in creating those random circumstances....

hsummer · Post by **hsummer** » June 24th, 2005, 3:39 am

I have been out of town and so was unable to try your latest.
This also gives me a good chance to try it, My situation is this though:
My laptop now has ~3 days of sent and recieved e-mails. I set it up to leave messages on the server so when I return from out of town, my desktop would get what my laptop got while gone.
The achive option (not really intended for this but my only means to do it) I am hoping will allow a "sync" of the laptop to the desktop.
Here are my concerns:
Laptop e-mails have been replied to, therefor their header files are now marked as such.
The e-mails are just copeid from the server.
The desktop will now download and remove the same "unmarked header emails" from the server.
I want to "sync" the laptop and desktop and archive everything for both backup and cleanup.

Now for the questions:
If I archive the laptop up to present date, and bring that to the desktop, what is going to happen to same-email w/different header flags?
Also:
Thedesktop has 2 profiles. The laptop has just one.
The common profiles have multiple accounts w/seperate inboxes and sent folders.
Befor I try this extension on that profile, are there any considerations I should be aware of?
By the way, the extnesion worked fine on the desktop's other standard profile.

One lst quesiton: How do I hide(or close) and then later show (r open) the archive when needed?
As mentioned the other day, the Outlook pst emthode,although having many cons, does have this ability and the drag-and-drop ability to archive selectivlyu from the current inbox to the opened archive inbox.
How will this extension compare in function and how will it compare for long term memory and files size on the hard drive?
The multi-account-muilti-inbox profile that is common on both the laptoip and desktop I wish to archive and sync is very large. The profile when I use the older mozilla-backup extension creates a nearly 1gig file size.
this was the biggest reasom I wanted to use an archive format to sync my laptop and desktop. It greatly reduces the file size and allows for easyy transfer via USB stick or similar means.
Sorry for the long post, but I am playing catch-up for being out of town.
One last thing to note:
Typical large corprate users are required to archive or backup their e-mail as well as "never delete company e-mail".
I am unfortunatly stuck with that requirement.
They are not happy with my choice to use thunderbird over Outlook based on archiving and syncing alone.
Given this fact and the fact that company laptops are tyically set up on a domain vice a workgroup makes for difficult archiving and syncing with at-home desktops that are not on the at-work domain but rather a home network workgroup.

Basically it all boils down to the same thing: Need easyt open and shut of archive files with drag-and-drop between the archive and regular inbox.
Also, The archive should be easy to move from desktop to laptop and vice versa for sake of recalling alder sent e-mails to update or resend in case of hard drive losses or present needs.

There again, sorry for the long post, but I am trying hard to proove (to my boss) that Thunderbird can be used in a typical office envoronment without worries of archiving and syncing.
Their (my boss) insecurities are based on difficulty of archiving, sync to desktop and drag-and-drop abilites.
They are currently somewhat justified in their insecurities.
If this whole sync and archive thing can be prefected via easy laptop-desktop archive and sync, then Thunderbird will make great headways against the Outlook monoploy curently seen in the corporate world.
(I can't stand the security problems with outlook and it's bugs that pop up when the pst file growns large).
and thanks again for your efforts to improve Thunderbird.

Old Ausdilecce · Post by **Old Ausdilecce** » June 24th, 2005, 4:47 pm

Sorry,

I just have *no other way to explain this to you*

TB IS NOT OUTLOOK !

The archive procedure and implementation of my extension is *absolutely* different and contrary to Outlook's..

My extension moves all messages that were sent/received before a particular date into ONE folder called "Archive"
The extension *does not* produce *one file* that can be transported to another machine and opened ( like in outlook )

the extension results *can NOT* be used to 'syncronize', 'backup' ( or anything else ) two computers..

Please ( PLEASE ! ) learn how to navigate TB's file structure. What you want to do can *easily* be accomplished with
a) a bit of knowledge
b) a bit of ingenuity
c) a bit of courage

Read about 'syncronizing' two machines here --> http://synchingthunder.sourceforge.net/ ( I have NOT used this personally )
Read about archiving NOT using this extension here --> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Archiving_your_e-mail
Read about TB's file structure and importing/exporting here --> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_and ... _your_mail

TB stores its mail in ONE OS file per TB folder.. If that TB folder has subfolders, they will be stored in a OS directory named after that TB folder with an extension of .sbd..

Now, it follows that *if* you were to copy
a) the OS file ( with the TB folder name )
b) the OS directory ( with the TB folder name + .sbd )

from one computer to another, that TB folder and all of its subfolders will now exist on both computers.. You NEED NOT paste that file and directory in the exact same place on the destination computer..

Just be sure to have TB shut down before you perform the paste operation.. Then, once TB is started, it will *automatically* see the new folder ( and subfolders )

wintogreen · Post by **wintogreen** » June 25th, 2005, 7:53 am

Here are the results from my test runs with 004 (same POP account as before). This time I tried some more complex things, such as one archiving operation followed by another.

First trial
1. Compacted folders, archived whole account for messages older than Jan 1 2005.
Result: worked perfectly. No problems like I saw before.

Second trial
(For this trial, I exited TB, trashed the mail files in the test profile, and restored the original unarchived files. Then I started TB and moved some folders around to create a deeper folder structure - up to 5 levels.)

2.1 Compacted folders, archived whole account for messages older than Jan 1 2005.
Result: worked perfectly.

2.2 Didn't compact folders, archived for older than 30 days. In other words, this is an archive right after the other archive.
Result: Alert message "A folder with that name already exists. Please enter a different name." But the archiving seems to have worked fine, as far as I can see.

2.3 Didn't compact folders, archived for older than 10 days.
Result: seems to have worked fine. No alert this time.

Third trial
(For this trial, I exited TB, trashed the mail files in the test profile again, and restored the original unarchived files. Then I started TB and renamed some folders so that they used only Japanese characters or a mixture of Japanese and English.)

3.1 Compacted folders, archived whole account for messages older than Jan 1 2005.
Result: Alert message "A folder with that name already exists. Please enter a different name" about 7 times in a row. Then another alert - "The message could not be moved or copied to folder [name] because writing to the folder failed...." Then the "folder... already exists" alert a few more times.
Two folders with Japanese and containing subfolders showed up in teh folderpane but without the subfolders. The subfolders were created on disk, though, and do show up on restart. EXCEPT... one subfolder corresponding to [name] in the "message could not be moved or copied" alert was not created on disk and did not appear in the folderpane.

3.2 Did not compact folders; repeated same archive (before Jan 1 2005) to see if it would catch the missing folder.
Result: "folder already exists" alert. Previously missing subfolder was created on disk but didn't show up in folderpane until restarting TB.

Also, I don't know if this happened after 3.1 or 3.2, but one folder with subfolders whose name contains Japanese and ends in English "etc" was created TWICE on disk -- as "XXX etc.sbd" and "XXX etc..sbd" (with two periods). The subfolders show up on disk inside "XXX etc..sbd" but the only thing that shows up in the folder pane is "XXX etc.sbd", completely empty, even after restarting TB. Weird.

Request: could you make it so that the previously entered date for archiving "sticks", so that you don't have to enter the date again each time? Thanks.

Old Ausdilecce · Post by **Old Ausdilecce** » June 25th, 2005, 2:48 pm

THanks for the exhaustive testing wintogreen..

It looks like the extension is still having issues with the folder uri encoding/decoding..

Could you paste a couple of those japanaese folder names here please.. I will attempt to create a couple of folders with those names and see where the failure point is..

I could make it so the previous date entered will persist, sure..

Thanks again

wintogreen · Post by **wintogreen** » June 25th, 2005, 7:45 pm

A couple folder names with Japanese were "仕事のジャンク" (kanji plus kana) and
"Family - 家族 etc" (Japanese between English with hyphen thrown in for fun). Hope they get rendered here correctly...

Old Ausdilecce · Post by **Old Ausdilecce** » June 25th, 2005, 10:51 pm

Wintogreen,

Don't know if I can debug for that, since I cannot even rename a folder to 仕事のジャンク or Family - 家族 etc..

I am at a loss as to where to go from here !

wintogreen · Post by **wintogreen** » June 26th, 2005, 1:15 am

Using TB 1.02 (English) on the Japanese version of WinXP, and I can name a folder in Japanese, Thai, Persian, Urdu, etc., via the TB UI. Can you do it by renaming the files directly through Windows? If you're using XP (and I seem to recall that you are), then maybe there's something you can tweak in XP's language preferences.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/usin ... ril28.mspx

The BBC is a good source for grabbing snippets of various languages, btw.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/us/languages.shtml

Didn't mean to make this into such a chore for you! Just thought it'd be wise to test with different char sets, since this is bound to be a popular extension.

hsummer · Post by **hsummer** » June 26th, 2005, 2:13 am

Sorry for this misunderstanding. I know TB is not at all like outlook. I was just stating how Outlook operates and what users are use to doing with it.
Personally I would rather do anything else to avoid Outlook. I was more so wanting to make familiar what other users do with Outlook so as to possibly spur some ideas into TB archive extensions that may ease the transition.
Tour extension for archiving is good. I have 2 profiles and one has 5 seprate POP/SMTP acounts with their own inboxes. It seems to handle them well.
I guess in that it is specifically for archiving and Outlook's archive feature is (or can be) used for things beyond archiving is what makes things different.
In any case, I wil remain in TB. It's just all around better than Outlook.
I am glad you are working on this extension. I makes my life a bit easier.
Thanks.

Old Ausdilecce · Post by **Old Ausdilecce** » June 26th, 2005, 2:45 pm

wintogreen,

No, I cannot rename OS files or folders to names like 仕事のジャンク or Family - 家族.

I would have to download and install the files required for east asian languages.. The download is 230Mb and I am ( unfortunately ) on dialup with a download limit..

Maybe you can help tho..

1) Shut down TB
2) In your prefs.js please edit or add the following prefs so they look like this..

user_pref("arctools.debug", true);
user_pref("arctools.debugtofile", true);

3) save your prefs.js file, restart TB, and attempt to do what you did before with folders with Japanese characters

4) in your c: drive, root directory, you will find a file called arctoolsDBGXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.txt ( where the Xs are numbers )

5) send me that file ( to [test] [at] [supportware] [dot] [net] )

That file will tell me how TB sees the underlying OS file and folder, and possibly why the extension is failing to create such

OHHH, PLEASE remember to shut down TB and set that debugtofile pref back to false or you will get hunderds of arctoolsDBG files in your c root folder ( one for every time you start TB )

wintogreen · Post by **wintogreen** » June 26th, 2005, 10:58 pm

ausdilecce wrote:3) save your prefs.js file, restart TB, and attempt to do what you did before with folders with Japanese characters

Could you be more specific about this part? Once I've inserted the two lines in prefs.js (which I've done), do you want me to start up TB, rename some English-only folders to include Japanese, then try archiving the whole account, and then exit TB and send you the txt file? Or do I not need to do all of that?

Here's what I've done so far: made a new test profile (since the old one had been through the ringer with nightlies etc.), set up a dummy POP account (not using global Inbox), put about 100MB of mail into it, creatively renamed a bunch of folders (some including Japanese), exited TB and deleted all the unneeded .msf and .sbd files that TB itself didn't remove, installed the extension and restarted, exited TB and added the two lines to prefs.js.

Old Ausdilecce · Post by **Old Ausdilecce** » June 26th, 2005, 11:19 pm

Wintogreen,

Great... Now start TB and attempt to use the archive feature, making sure that the folders with foldernames that have Japanese characters will be included in the archive ( the archive will fail, probably )

Now, locate that debug file and send that to me

wintogreen · Post by **wintogreen** » June 27th, 2005, 12:51 am

Just sent it.

Nevyn · Post by **Nevyn** » June 27th, 2005, 7:56 am

Here at work the auto archive feature of is used to move email from the imap server to a local disk folder as the server folder has limited space. I do this manually in TB by having a customized View which lists all emails older than a certain number of days, I then select all and move to Local Folder. So my auto-archive feature would do that automatically.

Old Ausdilecce · Post by **Old Ausdilecce** » June 27th, 2005, 2:50 pm

Wintogreen,

I was attempting to troubleshoot this extension from afar but it looks like I will have to just bite the bullet and get the XP language pack in order to save files with asian characters. There is no other way I can be assured that I am performing the encoding properly.. There are so many different encoding and decoding combinations..

Someday soon, I will download and install the lang pack..

Do you do any development work at all ? I could possibly advise you as to how to run a test so that I can see exactly what TB wants when creating a subfolder ( which is what the prob is )