[Dovecot] Thunderbird's (in)ability to mass-upload mails to IMAP (was: Re: importing outlook express messages to dovecot imap server)

[Stan Hoeppner]

Patrick Nagel put forth on 6/25/2010 9:27 AM:
> Hi Stan,
> 
> On 2010-06-25 07:19 UTC Stan Hoeppner wrote:
>> Patrick Nagel put forth on 6/25/2010 1:02 AM:
>>> On 2010-06-25 03:51 UTC Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> [...]
>>>> The first method is a single step process and is reliable.
>>>
>>> I tried something similar (with Thunderbird) once, and it caused a lot of
>>> trouble. We only had around 1.3 GB, IIRC, but thousands of folders. Here
>>> is a blog article that I wrote after I got it done with a perl script:
>>>
>>> https://patrick-nagel.net/blog/archives/77
>>
>> It's interesting that you weren't able/willing to track down the source of
>> the problem.
> 
> I spent some time on it, as I wrote in the blog article, but then there were 
> just more important things to get done. The most annoying thing was, that 
> there was no error message whatsoever. Error handling doesn't seem to be one 
> of Thunderbird's strengths (also things like 
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=257735 come to mind).
> 
>> It's also interesting how you mention "single drag and
>> drop".  In my experience, you can't drag/drop _folders_ in Thunderbird at
>> all.  All the migrations I've done this way required creating new folders
>> on the IMAP server (Dovecot), group selecting all of the mail in the
>> respective source folder, and selecting "copy" or "move" to the
>> destination folder.  I couldn't find a way to drag/drop a folder of group
>> of folders.  Care to share your secret?
> 
> I don't know when you tried it, but with the version I used at the time 
> (2.0.0.17? .18?), it was possible to copy one folder at a time from one 
> account to another, by drag & drop. 99% of the folders were inside one top 
> level folder, which I attempted to drag & drop, and which Thunderbird than 
> began to upload - only to silently fail after a few sub-folders.

Hmm.  At that time I was trying to copy folders into the main account tree,
which is how they were setup on the other account.  I just tried it in 3.0.5
and it works with an empty test folder created in Local Folders and dragged
into the main tree of my IMAP account.  IIRC this didn't work back in 2.x.  I
know I wasn't able to get it to work, that is.  However, I wasn't working with
Local Folders, but another IMAP account as the source.  Maybe it was and
IMAP->IMAP drag drop issue in 2.x?

-- 
Stan