Merge Thunderbird inbox from two separate mailboxes

Question

I have used 2 laptops over the last 2 years, and on each laptop I have set up my email accounts on them. I often had to go to each of the different laptops to retrieve specific e-mails, and as bad as it sounds I got used to it and it worked.

However, one of the laptops has now died (although I have a back up of the mailboxes on that laptop) and the other laptop I'm intending to give to my girlfriend for her to use. At the moment I have a desktop PC which I have rebuilt where I'm intending to put all of my emails on to it.

My problem is that I don't know how (or even if it's possible) to merge the different mailboxes from the different laptops and put them in to one mailbox which the desktop PC will use.

On the two laptops I used Thunderbird and on the Desktop PC I will also be using Thunderbird.

Solution 1

1. Backup both of those profile folders to an easily accessible storage for the new PC
2. Install Thunderbird on the new PC
3. Install ImportExportTools addon (Tools->Add-ons: Search for ImportExportTools)
4. Restart Thunderbird
5. Tools -> ImportExportTools -> Import mbox file
6. If you need your accounts, follow these instructions (ignore the instructions describing how to restore mail if you already did that in the previous step)
7. Enjoy :)

Solution 2

You can use the copy command at the command line:

copy inboxNEW+inboxOLD inbox

Then start thunderbird.

Comments

[sinni800]

For the future: Always connect to your mail boxes using IMAP. And for the answer: Thunderbird should have a method of exporting emails...

[Yogesh Dube]

Normally I would, but my mailbox is set to 20MB. So this isn't feasible.

[MaQleod]

Won't this just append the data from one file to the end of the other? Have you verified that this will keep the correct file formatting and not just corrupt the files so that Thunderbird can't read the result at all?

[Asain Kujovic]

for my test it was perfect result. i took the 'risk' of merging 2gb of last 2 years mails, + ~few MBs for last few weeks... If you have both files copied somewhere as back-up, it is not such a risk... But again - test-result was perfect for simple copy 1+2