Recovering icedove emails
So, before I installed Trisquel, I "saved" my mails from Icedove. I did that by basically copying to a usb drive the "mail" and imapmail" folders from ".icedove". I thought I could jsut copy them back now and get my emails back. But it doesn't work, when I try that it just gives me nothing in Icedove.
I tried using the "import" feature, created a fake ".thunderbird" folder and tried to import them. Nothing worked. How can I save my emails now?
There is an Extension for that purpose. Check https://addons.mozilla.org/es/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/ maybe will help.
Regards.
I've been tracking down old inboxes that are stuck in nooks & crannies around various old HDD's. I just copy and paste them into /home/user/.icedove/profile/Mail/LocalFolders/inbox (the LocalFolders is one which I created for that purpose). The folder "profile" is that odd and unique name that Mozilla products use for all the personal files of the user.
Once your old mail or inbox is situated in LocalFolders, Icedove will do its thing (especially if your "mail" folder is mostly text files and not binaries). You do not have to mess with the .sbd and .msf files, as your chances of getting the original organization back is nil, at least in my experience. Once you have a text mail folder, you can search, copy, re-file, etc. to your organizational heart's content.
I have twenty years or so of old emails re-organized this way.
I think I am missing a step somewhere.
I have several folders named "pop.openmailbox.org" "pop.openmailbox-1.org" etc. Inside there are files called "inbox" and "inbox.msf"
I tried creating a new folder in the .icedove/profile/Mail/ folder and putting those there but it doesn't work.
Do I need to do something more with icedove for it to read the emails?
This is why I hate things that try to keep my personal data inside
databases. Although if they're really needed, I don't evade them, but
just try to adapt my workflow so as to keep plain text backups of it.
As for the case of your e-mails, I have noticed such possible problem
when I happened to open the inbox file using a plain text editor and
noticed that the content wasn't written in a legitimate mail syntax, and
that they were assigned to an unique account identity for Icedove (more
generally, Thunderbird too). So I thought: "Oh-ow... If don't keep
frequent plain text copies of my emails, I'll probably lose them".
Luckily for the users, you can just open Icedove, open the folder where
the messages are (I'm talking about folders in Icedove), and then select
all the messages you want to save to the disk drive, right-click on them
and click on "Save as", which will enable you to save your messages in
EML file format (standardized by RFC822). But Icedove can import and
open the MBOX file format.
The same thing seems to apply to contacts and address books, although
Icedove saves them using the LDIF file format (LDAP Data Interchange
Format), but can import data in the VCF file format (vCard file).
I was able to get it to work!!
basically I had to add a new account (a fake one, so it wouldn't interfere with the other ones of same name) and point the local folder to the place where I had my older inbox copy.
Thanks!