Portable mail archives?

[Lindsay A. B. Moniz]

Evan Leibovitch wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>The recent discuission on direct manipulation of mail provoked me to
>finally ask about a problem I've had for a while.
>
>As some of you know, I've been on email for a while and have, in my
>time, subecribed to a few lists and received some large files. My "Local
>Folders" area  under Thunderbird is now about 4.5G and, once that mail
>is created it's extremely static. I would love to offload those archives
>onto a DVD, free up my HD, and be able to load/mount those archives onto
>any system on which I might be reading mail. Having the stuff on a DVD
>would also allow me to free up the 4.5GB that it's taking up on my
>laptop, and allow me to mount the DVD when I need to search old mail but
>otherwise reallocate that part of my hard disk (which on laptops aren't
>that big -- the mail folder is now 80% of my laptop's Linux partition).
>
>Unfortunately, Thunderbird appears to only support "Local Mail" under
>its own hierachy and won't allow me to designate, say, "/mnt/removable"
>as a directory under which more mail can be found. Or at least I haven't
>found a way to do this.
>
>Are symlinks the only answer? On one hand I'd love to consider other
>Linux MUAs such as Evolution and Kmail, but I'd prefer a cross platform
>solution that would allow me to access my DVD-based mail archives on a
>Windows system too.
>
>Anyone here have a suggestion?
>
>- Evan
>
Evan;

You should be able to do what you want with Thunderbird, although I 
haven't tried it exactly the way you mentioned.

Generally speaking, you would need to set up your main mail account to 
your present Thunderbird hierachy and your Local Folders to 
/mnt/removable (or wherever your DVD is mounted. It sounds like you only 
have the Local Folders visible right now.

Go to Edit -> Account Settings, then Server Settings under your mail 
account name. Click on the Advanced button. Make sure the middle radio 
button ("Inbox for this server's account") is chosen and click OK. Back 
at the Server Settings section, set the path of "Local Directory" to 
where your day-to-day mail is (it should already be set to it - if you 
exit Thunderbird and get back in, you should see your mail under the 
main mail account as well as under Local Folders). Again from the 
Account Settings window, go down to Local Folders and set the path for 
Local Directory to /mnt/removable.

I think that may do it, but I don't know what will happen when the DVD 
is not mounted.

You may already know, but it is critical to have ALL of the proper files 
moved to the DVD (ie. the .sdb and .msf files also). Try it out on a 
separate directory before you delete anything, just replace 
/mnt/removable with the directory path you are testing with.

I hope I got the gist of what you are looking for.

John.
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