How can i process and save my mails in boxes as plain text (without html content)?
I have a large archive of old messages from various accounts. They take up unnecessarily large space because they have many html formats. I am not interested in their old backgrounds or fonts, or smileyfaces etc - it would be enough for me to keep only their textual content. Is there any extension that converts multiple messages to plain text by removing html formatting?
I will add just in case that I am not interested in simply displaying the message as text, or exporting a single message to a text file. I want to convert messages to plain text in my archive mail folder box while reducing their size.
Thanks in advance for all the tips.
All Replies (6)
Try ImportExportTools NG (see picture).
https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools-ng/
Dear sfhowes, thank You for that hint, but its not what i'm looking for. I'm not interested in export of data to new file, but in conversion of already used inside Thunderbird files. I do not know how to explain it otherwise - Thunderbird handles my e-mails by saving them in its files within the program only. And for example, I want to convert a received message in my inbox to plain text, not export it externally.
I don't know of any way to have TB automatically convert an html message into a plain text message. You could edit each message manually with an add-on to remove html elements. It would be impossible to ask every correspondent to send you only plain text mail. Given the low cost of storage, it seems the easiest method would be to archive mail in Local Folders in an external or secondary drive, or archive with an app like MailStore Home.
OK, thank You. At the moment, I understand that there is no add-on that would remove unnecessary html elements from the message. Manually editing tens of thousands of e-mails is not an option. I also haven't found any email parser yet. We'll see if anything changes in the future. For now - I leave the problem unsolved.
This is a bit strange for me, as the current, frequently used html formats leave mailboxes jammed in two years. And it would be enough to remove the html and leave plain text. Maybe someone will do such an add-on?
For most users, the vast majority of space is taken by attachments, not html, so there is probably little demand for what you seek. However, it is possible to detach or delete attachments, either manually or through an automatic filter action.
Perhaps this is the case for most users, but not for me. Attachments were previously removed (both at the Gmail level with https://unattach.app/ and then using the Attachment Extractor add-on). The size of the .mbox files still results from the html formats. And we are talking here about sizes 6 GB per single box.
An average html message with the history of correspondence takes about 0.2 m. An average message with formatting of f.e. some background photos, which are not attachments and html objects, may be 0.6 mb. Just multiply it by tens of thousands of conversations over the years.
In short - I understand and thank you, but this is not the solution I need.