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Hello all,

I have no experience at all programming macros in Thunderbird and am
more or less new to the program. I got tired of all the viruses that
were attacking Outlook. Also I'm thinking of accessing mail from a Linux
partition in order to avoid further viruses.

But one thing I did like about recent versions of Outlook was that it
was possible to write little macros in elementary VB. I had one that did
a really vital function, export all the mail in a directory to text format.

In Thunderbird, I currently must go into my directory, select and open
my messages one by one, go into the file menu, select "Save as", rename
the message to a significant name including the date and specify the
save format as text. This is a huge bother. I want to rip whole
directories containing thousands of messages to text format so that they
can be zipped and archived on CD-ROM and remain readable in any program
and OS and searchable by keyword.

So, can I do this in Thunderbird? I'm not a hardcore geekess but I have
a little experience in VBA programming. Many thanks for beginner level
replies.


Elisa Francesca Roselli
Ile de France

Elisa Francesca Roselli wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I have no experience at all programming macros in Thunderbird and am
> more or less new to the program. I got tired of all the viruses that
> were attacking Outlook. Also I'm thinking of accessing mail from a Linux
> partition in order to avoid further viruses.
>
> But one thing I did like about recent versions of Outlook was that it
> was possible to write little macros in elementary VB. I had one that did
> a really vital function, export all the mail in a directory to text format.
>
> In Thunderbird, I currently must go into my directory, select and open
> my messages one by one, go into the file menu, select "Save as", rename
> the message to a significant name including the date and specify the
> save format as text. This is a huge bother. I want to rip whole
> directories containing thousands of messages to text format so that they
> can be zipped and archived on CD-ROM and remain readable in any program
> and OS and searchable by keyword.
>
> So, can I do this in Thunderbird? I'm not a hardcore geekess but I have
> a little experience in VBA programming. Many thanks for beginner level
> replies.
>
>
> Elisa Francesca Roselli
> Ile de France

Each Mozilla mail folder has two corresponding files in Windows
Explorer, the files for the Inbox folder are named Inbox and Inbox.msf.
The files without extensions contain the messages, the MSF files tell
the program how to display the messages. You should be able to open the
files without extensions in a text editor and see the messages listed
one after another.

Default Netscape/Mozilla profile folder locations:
http://www.holgermetzger.de/pdl.html

Doug G wrote:

> You should be able to open the
> files without extensions in a text editor and see the messages listed
> one after another.

Thank you for this extremely useful tip. It solves my problem.

So I can periodically, say monthly, just copy those files to another
location and rename them something like Friends092005.txt, and archive
away ...

Cool,

EFR
Ile de France

On Wed, 07 Sep 2005 18:09:38 +0200, Elisa Francesca Roselli
<> wrote:
>Doug G wrote:
>
>> You should be able to open the
>> files without extensions in a text editor and see the messages listed
>> one after another.
>
>Thank you for this extremely useful tip. It solves my problem.
>
>So I can periodically, say monthly, just copy those files to another
>location and rename them something like Friends092005.txt, and archive
>away ...
>

This should work too, and is probably easier:

Thunderbird AutoSave Extension
http://www.supportware.net/mozilla/#ext13

It doesn't really say it on the web page, but it adds context menu items to
your message list to export messages either to separate files or to a
single file.

I think that it also acts as a filter for automatically saving messages,
but I've only tried that with imap and wasn't able to get it to work
reliably.


Cheers

Elisa Francesca Roselli wrote:

> Doug G wrote:
>
>> You should be able to open the files without extensions in a text
>> editor and see the messages listed one after another.
>
>
> Thank you for this extremely useful tip. It solves my problem.
>
> So I can periodically, say monthly, just copy those files to another
> location and rename them something like Friends092005.txt, and archive
> away ...
>
> Cool,
>
> EFR
> Ile de France

You might also want to see:

http://mozilla.edmullen.net/moz_archive.html

--
Ed Mullen
http://edmullen.net
http://edmullen.net/Mozilla/moz.html
There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government
working for you. - Will Rogers