Submitted 3 hours ago by halfapage@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
If I download e-mails from my account using a client like Thunderbird, can I just somehow copy them to a thumb drive and open them in whatever program later, without logging in to the account etc?
I want to delete my account, but need access to all my e-mails off.
In Outlook it’s called the .pst file.
In thunderbird I think it’s an mbox file.
Not a lot of mail apps out there. I’d go with thunderbird mbox.
IT guy here.
You can save individual emails as .msg or .eml files, way easier to work with if you only have a few emails to export.
Yes you can, but the exact process is lost on me as I haven’t used Thunderbird in ages. It should be able to export your mailboxes into a standard format (is it mbox?) or if it’s only a few specific emails you should be able to export them individually as .eml files.
Yes, you can, you have a user profile in Thunderbird, that is where your emails are stored locally.
You should first look up downloading your emails locally, this depends on the connection to the mail server.
If you are running POP3, it normally downloads your emails directly to your computer automatically, if you are using IMAP, then it normally doesn’t.
Thunderbird is a popular email client, there are plenty of guides…
I did that once as part of an escape from Google. Just downloaded everything to thunderbird and then severed the link. Then thunderbird became my source of truth for emails. Whatever I needed to delete, I did (subscriptions, ham emails, et) and then I uploaded to another vendor which was much cheaper for the starting tier. I can skip that last step.
Just make sure to severe the link so thunderbird doesn’t do anything stupid. But you can also take a backup of your inbox in case thunderbird does do something silly.
Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 minutes ago
Once you’ve downloaded all your emails, if you go to Tools > Export, you can back up your entire profile there.
I’d recommend you set up archiving first (I have it archive to year then year-month, but what works for you may differ), then Ctrl+A to select all your messages and click the Archive button. This’ll make the archive a bit more manageable.
Then you simply take the backup to another machine and do Tools > Import. All your messages will be imported, and you’ll have a well-organised history complete with full-text search on both machines. :)