How to archive emails to a folder on my computer?
 

I am using Linux Mint ver. 17.3.

I have an online Hotmail account, now called Outlook. It has thousands of emails in it.

How can I move or back-up all these emails, and everything else on my email account, to a folder on my computer? I would like to have the option of deleting all the online emails once they have been downloaded. And more importantly, be able to search through and look at these emails offline.

A few minutes ago I set up Thunderbird to access my email account. I have also gone into the Hotmail account settings to allow the use of POP.

But I cannot see how to archive the emails. In reading online about this, I get a vague impression that you may have to archive emails one by one. But as I have thousands of emails I cannot do them individually.

So how can I do the above please? Will Thunderbird do it? Should I use some other software instead?

Thanks.

p.s. I thought this would be a five minute job and expected I would see a button on Thunderbird that said "Archive emails", but now it looks as if it will be a five-day job.

In Thunderbird (in Windows at least, I've never done this in linux) you can usually simply copy the profile folder that contains all the e-mail and that should suffice.

You could also try to export your e-mail. I don't think thunderbird has a built-in export option, but you can install an add-on:
http://its.isber.ucsb.edu/guides/exp...il-thunderbird (that's probably for windows, but it should be the same in Linux)

By the way, you have to reconfigure your Thunderbird to use POP, instead of the default IMAP. It's not enough to simply change the option in your online account - you also need to do it in thunderbird. Then you can choose for how long emails should be kept on the server.

Thunderbird has a "Local Folders" store in addition to the IMAP cache for your Hotmail account.
Just copy (or move) the mails to your "Local Folders".

:thumbsup:

Sorry I'm still as confused as ever. The emails are held online somewhere, not on my computer, so being told to copy the email folder does not make sense.

To be clear, my question is - How can I back up (i.e. copy) to my hard disk all the several thousand emails which are all online and held by what used to be called Hotmail but is now called Outlook? Note that I have never used Thunderbird, I only installed it because I thought it would do this for me, but it does not appear to have any means of doing it.

Which is odd because when I installed Thunderbird a few years ago for the same purpose, but only used it once, it did all this for me with no problems.

So, to repeat, please can anyone tell me how to copy (i.e. back up) several thousand emails from my online Hotmail/Outlook account to my hard disk?

Thanks

You can use getmail.

getmail will download and store the emails locally, in your chose of storage format: mbox or maildir.

Help on configuring getmail: http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/configuration.html
Outlook settings: https://support.office.com/en-us/art...1-87b80fa94970

/home/user/.thunderbird contains all emails (and profile info) for thunderbird and can simply be copied and used with future instances of thunderbird.

Copy it to somewhere safe. And copy it to future /home/user/ to be able to continue to use it with future thunderbird installations.

oh yes it does make sense.
you must understand how IMAP works - or just just try it?

Ahh... You need to install Thunderbird and setup the account properly in thunderbird, using pop3 or imap settings which you get from your email provider (typically pop3.emailservice.com). Once you have access to your online account through thunderbird it will download all your emails and provide an automatic archive (which you can copy to any other thunderbird version and computer).

I still think the OP will get the best results, and perhaps the easiest method, by using getmail. This method of using Thunderbird adds needless complication and extra step of copying the emails. As a bonus (s)he can add a cron job using getmail, choose the location him(her)self without too much hassle, etc.

If you use getmail you obtain a format that is not easily recoverable.
Or at least I did. :)

What do you mean by "not recoverable"? getmail saves to either the standard UNIX mbox format (which, IIRC is the default), or to a MailDir.

So, once you have your archive with getmail, how do you read/forward/reply to the messages?

You simply open the mailbox into the mail client. What kind of question is this?

How?
What servername do you enter into the client when asked, when setting up a new account?
What user/pass?
The kind the OP would ask if they follow the getmail suggestion and then not find the mail in Tbird or any usable form.