Thunderbird server download questions

[PN0]

I have some questions about the current functions available in Thunderbird. There is a web domain that I administer for a family member that will be expiring soon which we do not plan to renew. The family member has been accessing their email via a webmail interface (squirrel). The hosting company cannot or will not make a copy of this email folder available to me - inbox, sent, etc..

I'm considering installing Thunderbird onto their pc and attempting to download their emails to the T-bird client. There are aproximately 6000 emails in various folders in this account - somewhere around 2gb. My recollection is that if I set this up w/ POP it will only download the inbox - leaving the other folders untouched. Is that correct? From what I've read IMAP can/will download the additional folders also - is that correct? If I were to use IMAP I'd like to ensure that I download all of the message contents including attachments - not just the subject lines.

As the domain is expiring - the hosting will too be cancelled - so this account will not be actively used once the emails have been downloaded. I would probably leave the T-bird client installed on their pc but change the settings so it cannot try to download additional emails to that account from the hosting server. At that point I assume that I can just copy the profile folder and save it as a backup to their account. This would leave them access to their old emails within the client and me with a copy of the profile folder as a backup in the event I need to install it to another iteration of T-bird sometime in the future.

If the general plan above makes sense and is do-able - I'd like to get a better idea of the settings and toggles I need to ensure all the messages and attachments download to the T-bird client. I'd also like to get a sense of how likely it is that T-bird can actually download all of the contents without any glitches. If I recall correctly earlier iterations of T-bird were somewhat limited in the amount they could download from a server after installation.

Additionally - I have no preference as to using IMAP or POP as this won't be a 'live' email account - so either will work for me. I'll likely be using a win7 system to install the T-bird client onto. Does the current version of T-bird support win7 or will I need an earlier version? I suspect I may have additional questions as this proceeds - but hopefully I've supplied enough information to get the ball rolling on this query. Thanks in advance for any assistance provided.

[DanRaisch]

My recollection is that if I set this up w/ POP it will only download the inbox - leaving the other folders untouched. Is that correct?

That's correct. It's a limitation of the POP protocol and would be work the same way in any email client.

From what I've read IMAP can/will download the additional folders also - is that correct? If I were to use IMAP I'd like to ensure that I download all of the message contents including attachments - not just the subject lines.

Both statements are correct and are the default settings for an IMAP type account.

...so this account will not be actively used once the emails have been downloaded. I would probably leave the T-bird client installed on their pc but change the settings so it cannot try to download additional emails to that account from the hosting server.

That being the case you will want to take additional precautions to protect the message store. You might create message filters for each folder that will be receiving message so that incoming messages are copied to sub-folders of Thunderbird's Local Folders pseudo-account. This will ensure that unintentionally connecting to the IMAP server after the account is no longer valid will not risk deleting messages.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Filters_%28Thunderbird%29
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Local_Folders

You should also consider downloading an mbox file viewer utility. ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/mbox-viewer/ )

A total message store size of 2GB will not exceed Thunderbird's storage limits. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Limits_-_Thunderbird

[PN0]

Thank you, DanRaisch - for your reply and information. I'm pretty comfortable with the installation process and think I can muddle through the IMAP setup. I'll need to do a bit of study on message filters and get a better grasp of the local folder role and properties before I can nail down my plan. I've been using T-bird for over 20 years but only for POP accounts and I've never gotten too elaborate with my set-up. Just for the humor of it I'll confess that I was using T-bird 2.xx (the last iteration for win98) until about 3 years ago. The linux system I switched over to a few years ago had T-bird 12 as default and I never updated it. The transition was dead easy - just dropped the 2.xx profile into the copied .T-bird folder (after deleting the default profile folder) and renamed the old T-bird folder. Next time I opened T-bird 12 it loaded up all my folders and msgs just as they'd been in 2.xx. I guess the point is that I've kept far from the bleeding edge of what T-bird is probably capable of - so bear with!

Once I've had a chance to study filters and local inbox I'll probably have a few more questions. Thanks again!