export old Thunderbird emails to .html or .txt?

melindamusil · Jan 13, 2015

I'm getting ready to reinstall Windows. This is an old-ish PC running Windows Vista. I am planning to upgrade it to Windows 7.

There are several old emails in Thunderbird on this computer. Is it possible to back up these emails in a non-Thunderbird format, such as .html or .txt? I no longer use Thunderbird and no longer need these emails as emails - I'm just interested in saving them for nostalgia reasons.

I've googled this problem ten ways to Sunday, and the only solution I've found has been to back up the Tbird profile and, if I ever want to read the email again, to reinstall Tbird. It's an okay solution, but I'd like to avoid reinstalling Tbird if I can.

Alexys · Jan 13, 2015

They already are in text format, pretty much. Thunderbird apparently uses the mbox format to store email, and mbox is just the headers + text of all the emails concatenated together into one file (with no indexing, mind you, so you'd have to do a text search on the file to find anything specific). So if you're satisfied with one large text blob, you don't have to do anything at all except copy the file off.

Dave Williams · Jan 14, 2015

Just a note: if you have been accepting mail in html format, most of the mbox file will be full of html, which can make it pretty ugly.

Since you just want an archive, I'd export to text. Then just grep through the files or concatenate them back into a single file you can browse through.

Some of the mailing lists I'm subscribed to insist on text-only; I can view any of the mbox files with no problem. The ones that allow html... ugh.

export old Thunderbird emails to .html or .txt?

melindamusil

practical experience, FTW

Alexys

Took a wrong turn at the Pleiades

Dave Williams

Zappa isn't frank!