email - Keep folders local to machine when using imap on thunderbird

25
2014-03
  • sam

    We have an email account that we use as a team.. [email protected] (running on google apps for business), we all connect to the account via imap, using a mixture of mac mail and thunderbird.

    One member of the team want to use folders to file messages related to certain jobs, normally this would be fine, but becuase its a shared imap account it means everyones email will be filed like this aswell, which dosnt suite the way some people work.

    Is there a solution or a workaround that could work for everyone one.. ie folders that are local to the machine so that every one elses email just sit in the 'INBOX'.

    I know in mac mail you can use a smart folder (which isnt really a folder its a custom filter, but gives you the same effect), but the computer we want to run folders in is using thunderbird.

    • Answers
  • Chloe

    I was looking for something similar since I wanted to have my IMAP act just like POP3. I don't actually want my emails on a random server for snooping by nosy governments or Chinese hackers. The closest I could find so far is Message Filters: Tools > Message Filters.

    http://kb.mozillazine.org/Filters_%28Thunderbird%29


    • Related Question

    Thunderbird: moving email from local Junk folder to IMAP folder yields "Message contains invalid header"
  • Peltier

    Whenever I try to move an email from a local Junk folder to an IMAP folder in Thunderbird, I get the following error message:

    The current command did not succeed. The mail server responded: Message contains invalid header

    If Thunderbird's Junk folder is an IMAP folder on the server, then after Thunderbird has moved messages to that folder, I can successfully move messages from Junk back into to some other IMAP folder. However, if the Junk folder is not on the server, then moving a message from the local Junk folder to an IMAP folder yields the aforementioned error.

    The only interesting thing I've found about this error is "Message contains invalid header" from the MozillaZine Knowledge Base. That article officially is about importing folders from another email client, and does not mention the Junk filter as another possible cause. However the proposed solution is not very helpful since it requires manual editing of the message box files.

    Any better ideas?

    EDIT: make sure you read the comments before answering the question.


    • Related Answers
  • harrymc

    Found this article : "Fix invalid mail headers when moving from Thunderbird to IMAP", where a Python script is proposed that fixes all mailbox files in a given directory.

    Even if you don't use Python, it should be quite easy to do the same in another language or a text-editor or sed. Apparently, this fixed the problem for the author of the article.

  • Synetech

    Actually, I found another thing that causes this error. I converted my Outlook mail to Thunderbird via a program called MailStore Home and in some of the results mbox files there were extraneous lines with the following

    Microsoft Mail Internet Headers Version 2.0

    Once I removed those lines, messages that hadn't been able to move to an IMAP folder were able to be moved.