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

[Patrick Nagel]

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.

Patrick.

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