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Backing up an IMAP account in Thunderbird

thunderbirdHenrik Gemal provides an excellent walkthrough on backing up an IMAP account in Thunderbird using another profile to download the emails into your local folders. Unlike Mail.app, Thunderbird doesn’t keep a local cache of IMAP accounts.

He also provides some suggestions for restoring the emails from that backup profile in the event of disaster.

My only hesitation is that the backup server of my Fastmail account (for example) is much less likely to break or get stolen or lost than my PowerBook.

An extra step — backing up the backup onto an external harddrive — seems prudent.

More and more I find myself wanting to blog about Thunderbird as well as Mail.app. I can feel a “Two Birds” email blog coming on.

What do you think? Can the two mail clients coexist on the one blog? Or should I wait until the urge passes?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, 5th January, 2006 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Apple Mail, Not Apple Mail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Backing up an IMAP account in Thunderbird”

  1. Mike says:
    January 6th, 2006 at 8:36 pm

    You should definitely wait till the urge passes. :-)

    You’ve got an established focus, and it’s fine.

    But occasionally updating readers on any items of interest on Thunderbird – and other mail clients for OS X – even if there is not some direct relation in the story to Mail.app is a good idea.

    Maybe you could tell us about the new Cocoa version of Eudora – if it ever sees the light of day.

    http://www.eudora.com/techsupport/kb/2654hq.html

    And I guess the anticipated open source IMAP mailer called Kiwi might deserve an item in time – interesting that it will make use of Core Data:

    http://www.theronge.com/2005/12/19/why-i-chose-coredata-over-maildir/

    It will also be intriguing to know what Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch comes up with (although he is writing a program for himself not one for distribution to typical end users).

    http://rentzsch.com/links/macUserAndEmailer

    In fine, I’d say, no, don’t let Thunderbird crash the party, but the occasional item on it and othr happenings in the email space on OS X would be of interest.

  2. Tim says:
    January 7th, 2006 at 1:51 am

    Thanks for the feedback and for the suggestions.

    And for the advice. I am feeling over it today. I think it was a passing phase :-)

  3. fifthdecade says:
    February 2nd, 2007 at 1:58 pm

    Hey – a lot of Switchers coming over to Mac, used to Thunderbird as they didn’t trust MS solutions, prefer to use an app they know rather than one they don’t know. That’s me.

    Please keep the Thunderbird tips flowing too!

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