It just occurred to me I haven't posted here in over a year. Just a related note: I'll often post shorter usability segments in my signature blog (rguillem.blogspot.com) journal posts (#xxxx J)
To begin this post, the context is a workhorse laptop that has seen better days. On a trip to Texas, the power button dislodged and I now have to use a narrow-tip screwdriver to manually restart the system. I started running into baffling issues with USB devices, and my touchpad and touchscreen stopped working. (I thought initially they were driver issues one day when I had disconnected devices in dealing with reboot issues, functionality returned). I had started using a new computer for browsing and already designated it for my new workhouse. One of the first steps was migrating my email client, Thunderbird, with various local folders and related filters.
Looking over past posts. one particular focus has been emails. For the longest time I used email clients as a bridge solution to an email archive. I used Outlook Express during its 1996-2008 lifetime and developed my own corruption/archiving/migration tools. Mozilla Thunderbird started in 2003. When Microsoft transitioned to Vista and Outlook Express' successor, Microsoft Mail, I ran into chronic usability issues starting MS Mail with any nontrivial number of emails, and I soon thereafter migrated to Thunderbird, which provided startup times comparable to what I was used to with Outlook
My archiving solution used to be AskSam, a freestyle database software I first licensed in the late 1980's. Probably my biggest use was to store my emails and write some powerful and flexible queries on contents, sender, dates, etc. It's last version (7) was released in 2008 and I think its websites had stopped to function by some time in 2013 (by a user observation I found via Google) I know I had an operational copy on one of my PC's and had exported some of my askSam files as of 2016 in text format. I had tried to reinstall on this PC I'm drafting this post and failed, even though I was sure I had my legitimate serial number. It wasn't clear why it was failing. I hypothesized it was doing some validation through the Internet to some server online no longer operable. I couldn't find a copy of the free viewer--in my files or via Google. [MyInfo implied it had an add-on that could read *.ASK files. Very misleading: you have to export data in a specific format, which means chicken-or-the-egg: you have to have a functioning version of AskSam to generate the data in the required format. Not very helpful,]
It had struck me I hadn't tried to install AskSam on the existing laptop. I didn't expect any difference since both PCs run essentially the same version of Windows. To my surprise, I was able to install and get it to accept my license number; there are some quirks, e.g., I got a popup to register online, which didn't work, of course, but it allows you to register offline. I'm not going back to resume archive at least the bulk of my emails, but back around 2016, I had exported only a fraction of my files, so I may export the remaining files which I haven't done to date
Now, of course, Thunderbird has rudimentary search utilities plus useful add-ons. For example, occasionally I have seen redundant emails downloaded, and so one add-on allows us to dedup emails. Another is an export-import tool which in theory would allow me to bridge restoring groups of emails back up to Gmail.
But in a manner similar to how I used to archive emails in AskSam, I started using free (for personal use) MailStore Home, which supports Thunderbird emails to local directory clones, typically on external drives (and these are periodically replicated elsewhere). So, I'll typically update Mailstore daily. The MailStore local folders are monthly transferred to perm folders. Hence, if my PC dies, I shouldn't lose more than a day of emails. This does not control geographical risk or home loss, but I do maintain some cloud archives.
So how did I migrate? Well, first, you need to install at least one email address for the Thunderbird install, typically my core gmail account. [Note: I use the POP vs. IMAP download messages to PC option.] Typically, I store my local folders on a cloud-mirrored mount point and override the local default. in Thunderbird. The message filter file exists but doesn't seem to work until I replace the target Appdata\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxx-default-release with a copy of the corresponding contents from the source. After a restart you should see all your email accounts from the source and you may need to update passwords.
I ran into two practical problems: configuration of my Microsoft (live.com) email account and a problem with saving drafts in my core gmail account.
I followed an analogous procedure to this University of Texas manual configuration for my outlook.com account. I think the default configuration gives you a separate popup of your emails.
In a past post I discussed Enigmail, a PGP add-on to Thunderbird. More recently, Thunderbird has built in support for OpenPGP. Almost no one I correspond with has set up puhlic/private key pairs, so I've mostly used it among my own accounts. more for a proof of concept/demo case. Anyway, I think I first got a hint it was encryption-related here. At some point I got the a more explicit key message and ended manually deleting referenced lines in prefs.js in the profile release directory. In hindsight, it may have been all that was needed was to disable the option in the end-to-end encryption panel for the gmail account and/or export/copy the certs in question from the source and import them on the target.
