"Archiving" Local Folder archives
Hi,
I use the archiving feature of Thunderbird to move e-mail into yearly archives (Local Folders). I now have yearly archives going back a number of years. I appreciate the fact that they can be indexed by the search feature.
However they do take a fair amount of space on my laptop. I'd like to move some of the older years to a networked disk. I have several different e-mail accounts. My archives look like this:
- Local Folders
- Comcast mail
- 2011
- Tree of sub-folders
- 2012
- Tree of sub-folders
- etc.
- Another mail ID
- 2011
- Tree of sub-folders
- etc.
Can I select individual years within an e-mail identity and have only those on a networked disk? How would I do that?
What happens when I am away from my local network (and the networked disk with some of the Local Folders is not available)? Am I correct that those folders would simply not appear in my Thunderbird navigation pane? Or would it generate an error?
I generally set only the most recent years' archives to "Include messages in this folder in global search results". It's terrific to be able to find things from previous years, but I generally don't need to look back that many years. I also assume there's a performance penalty the larger the number of folders included.
Should I be sure that folders moved to the networked disk are set to NOT be included in the global indexing? Would having that set generate errors or strange behavior when I did a search while away from the networked disk? Or would the results in those folders show up (since they are in the index), but simply not be displayable?
Thanks for any help or guidance anyone can provide!
All Replies (6)
you can place mail for an individual account on the network disk, but not individual folder in an account.
Some years ago I did have an account I placed on a usb drive on my local machine which I call archive and stored mail in folders in the account. It created a few issues with not being able to connect when getting all mail and had some excess folders, but as a cold storage it worked ok.
Thanks. I suspected that might be the case.
That said, how do I create an archive folder on a networked disk (or, more precisely, anywhere but the Local Folders directory in the Thunderbird profile)?
If I click on Local Folders in the navigation pane, I can add a new folder, but only in the same location as the rest of the Local Folders. There doesn't seem to be an option to select something outside the Thunderbird directory.
as I said you can only do it with whole accounts. Or for that matter if you do not use local folders for anything the local folders account.
Account settings allows you to set the local directory. but you have to move any existing files and folders there, which is why I said if you do not use local folders.
Extra Local Folders can be defined with the LocalFolders add-on.
Thanks for that suggestion. I found the Local Folders add-on this morning while rooting around for information and marked it for further investigation.
Having not yet done that, and for the benefit of others who might see this thread, am I correct that this would give me the choice of specifying a different local folder for the archives for an individual e-mail account?
Local Folders aren't tied to any one account, but you can of course set a target folder for each account in Copies & Folders, to a folder in either the built-in Local Folders, or one defined by the add-on.