Transferring folders loses messages is there a limit? SOLVED

[terrathunderbird]

Hi there...

I'm moving off of Compuserve. And Dan suggested moving the active/synched folders to "local folders" and then deleting the active folders in webmail. Great idea! But I can't seem to get it to work. I move the active Compuserve folder into Local Folders on TB, but not all the emails get transferred. I'm mystified... I've deleted the Local Folders version and tried again. And more came over but not all gain...

Alas... Any ideas?

[terrathunderbird]

OK, I see what's happening. When I move an actively synched folder to the Local Folders, it actually downloads these from the webmail account when it's moving them. It appears to be working. But I have sketchy Comcast internet, and it may fail again. If it does, I'll try doing the folder move off-line.

[terrathunderbird]

Nope. It gets to 16,189 messages and quits. Is there a limit on how many emails can be in a folder in the Local Folders?

[tanstaafl]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Limits_-_Thunderbird

The number of messages in a folder is limited to 4 billion. The maximum size of a single message is currently limited to 4GB. Folders can be larger than 4GB.

Perhaps you are running into some limit imposed by AOL/Compuserve ? Try manually moving some of the messages that did not get moved when you moved the entire folder.

[terrathunderbird]

Thanks! I'm wondering if it's timing out or something.

I can't tell which messages went without a lot of work. There are like 40,000 messages.

I'm trying to figure out how to do this all off-line to avoid the sketchy Comcast link.

I am "synching for off-line use". Is that the correct process?

[tanstaafl]

Nope. That's what you want to avoid as it will download a copy of everything.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Minimize_the_ ... _a_profile has a different overall goal but it might help you understand how to disable downloading that mail to the hard disk.

[terrathunderbird]

Thanks, but I'm trying to get an accurate set of backups for off-line use, because once I delete the webmail account, I won't have access to the online folders anymore...

So hoping to first get an accurate version of the folders in TB before I do that...

And I can't seem to get the entire profile to backup, nor can I seem to move the folders to the local folders and get all the emails to actually come with the move.

Is there a way to accurately synch for off-line use?

[tanstaafl]

I believe you can export all of the messages in a IMAP folder using the ImportExportTools add-on as .eml files. You can import that later on into Local Folders. I don't think it supports exporting the remote folder as a mbox file for a IMAP account, it will only do that for local copies (offline folder).

https://freeshell.de/~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html

[terrathunderbird]

Thanks! can I run the export in parallel with the synching? it's taking forever, the synching. Maybe I choose the action a few times too many. Can I stop it without damaging anything? I force-quit the app, but when it started up, it started downloading again

[mgagnonlv]

You could use the Import/Export extension (link above) to export emails in a file.

If you want to export messages from the Compuserve account to Local Folders, I would suggest the following tips:

– In the list displaying the message list, click on the rightmost icon on the right side of column (subject, correspondent, date, labels...), and add the column size so you can display the size of messages.

– Especially if your Compuserve account is an IMAP account, move messages by chunks and leave some time for background work to progress.
For example, move all messages from the Compuserve Inbox dated 2010 to the Local Folder Inbox. Once the process is over, move messages dated 2011, etc. You will notice the process is much faster if you move stuff in smaller chunks... and it's easier to solve problems if your connection is flaky.

Finally, one thing I noticed when moving IMAP accounts around a few years ago. Stay connected a long time! If you move 1000 messages and quit as soon as the move is finished, you may notice some messages don't have the proper date. If you stay connected overnight, all background information will be properly synchronized.

[terrathunderbird]

Thanks! great suggestions!

I already stuffed the 2010 messages into a folder named 2010. And then when I moved the 2010 folder to Local Folders is when messages were missing. But I like the idea of moving some at a time to the Local folders. I think I'll try that next...

[terrathunderbird]

It worked! It even gives me a count for how many messages are in the folder, which MBoxView does not.

So far so good!

THANKS everyone!

So the bottom line was the I was NOT missing emails in the back. I was using an email viewer that couldn't accommodate the folder size. Yay!