Keep local copy of all emails using IMAP
Hello!
I just switched from POP3 to IMAP to synchronize my email account with multiple devices, and now I'm facing a problem which seems a very basic feature of an email client, but I couldn't make it work in Thunderbird. So I hope someone can help me:
As using IMAP can easily lead to data loss, I would like Thunderbird (running on my "main" computer) to keep a local copy of all emails. So, each time Thunderbird fetches new emails from the server, I would like to create a copy of these emails in the Local Folders. This is the list of my approaches and the reasons why they did not work so far:
1.: Thunderbird archiving feature. Problem: This must be executed manually and emails are not copied, but deleted from the server.
2.: One single filter to copy all emails without condition, executed in a certain time interval: This feature does not distinguish new emails from emails that have been copied previously. So I will end up with hundreds of local copies of each email.
3.: Two filters- one to copy incoming emails, one to copy outgoing emails: This is the closest I could get, but if I send an email using another device, no local copy will be made as this filter is only applied to emails sent by Thunderbird.
Is there any other possibility I may have missed?
由 mar.sie 於 修改
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Pretty simple really, add the account to Thunderbird as POP and let it make the pop copies in local folders. Modify your action on sending mail to BCC yourself and then the sent mail (when delivered to you) will be included in the pop accounts downloads. If your other devices lack that ability, I can't help with their deficiencies. Make an incoming mail filter on the pop account to delete mail from yourself off the server when it is downloaded into the POP account. Use the IMAP account for everything else.
Or just manually copy mail periodically from the sent folder to local folders.
BTW making local backups is not a feature of any mail client. Making working with your email easier and more unified is the purpose of them not true archival storage.
Thank you for your suggestion! The problem is, as soon as I use POP, all messages that are downloaded by TB are automatically marked as read on the server. This may be a setting of my email provider, but unfortunately I cannot change it.
In that case, you can use a different email service provider, let's call it a backup account, to store a copy of all the messages that your primary account contains, then setup this backup account in Thunderbird as POP and have it store its messages in Local Folders. This way, the original messages in the primary account will not be marked as read until you read them via IMAP on any of your devices.
Outlook.com, Yahoo and Gmail both support importing/fetching all the messages contained in the mailbox of other email providers' accounts via IMAP and they will keep fetching new messages as long as they remain connected to that account. If you don't want to keep them connected after the existing messages have been imported, you can configure your primary account to forward new messages to the backup account. As for sent messages, you can BCC them to the backup account. All this of course assumes you trust the backup provider with your messages.