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Thunderbird - saving email messages to disk - the date a message received is not saved as a seperate field so sorting in mail received order is not possible

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  • Last reply by Toad-Hall

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Hi Guys, am a new user to Thunderbird and am saving my mailbox messages to disk as a security copy, using 'save as'. When I view the files with windows explorer, the first field contains the title etc including the sender and date etc, but not a separate field for the received date. is it possible to have this as a separate field when it is saved so I can sor the messages into their correct order, or is there a better way to obtain a copy of the mailbox items in received order? I have saved the messages as .eml. Many thanks

Hi Guys, am a new user to Thunderbird and am saving my mailbox messages to disk as a security copy, using 'save as'. When I view the files with windows explorer, the first field contains the title etc including the sender and date etc, but not a separate field for the received date. is it possible to have this as a separate field when it is saved so I can sor the messages into their correct order, or is there a better way to obtain a copy of the mailbox items in received order? I have saved the messages as .eml. Many thanks

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Emails in Thunderbird are stored as a piece of text in an mbox file, when you choose to save as .eml file they become a new file. As you may know, all files and folders on any computer that are newly created will have the date of when they are created. But this is a bit of a pain when you would like to easily locate emails stored as .eml files and use the 'date' the email was sent.


What you need is to get the date of email added to the name of the .eml file. You could do this manually by renaming the file when you create the file, however that is a bit laborious.

Use this addon extension: ImportExportTools

How to install addon extension info:

After installing and restarting Thunderbird at prompt.... In the 'Addons Manager' tab, you will see the name of the addon extension.

  • click on the ImportExportTools 'Options' button
  • click on 'Filenames' tab

Customise the format for Filenames.

  • select 'use following format'
  • select 'Subject' 'Name/Sender' and 'Date.......But you can set whatever you prefer.
  • click on OK

Now your preferences are set up....

Right click on highlighted email(s) and select:

  • 'Save selected messages' > 'EML format'
  • choose where to save them.