How can I transfer my Incredimails emails to Thunderbird, help please

happyhero

Hi I have been using Incredimail for years (I kept meaning to change but didn't get round to it).

I've started using Thunderbird now as Incredimail is about to finish support and so forces me to finally make that change but Incredimail uses an awkward format for emails. 

Looking online all the free programs they only transfer a maximum of 25 emails mostly and I have thousands I want to keep from the past in folders I created within Incredimail.

I don't really want to buy any software so is there a way to do it free in bulk, ie say 500 or 1000 or unlimited emails in one go?

I have Incredimails 2.5.
 
Any help appreciated.

tehone

What is the format it uses? Is your email still stored on the server somewhere and you can re-retrieve it
Presumably its mainly the words that are most important to preserve in the email from over the years?
Does incredimail have an export function at all? I used it once years ago so can't recall much about it at all

tronator

If Incredimail was configured as IMAP, then you don't need to do anything. Just setup Thunderbird with IMAP and your emails will be there. If you used POP3, then disable fetching emails, setup the same account again in IM, this time as IMAP. Then move or copy the emails from one account to the other in IM.

happyhero

Hi I thought I would update things on here, possibly it may help others. I have learned a few things along the way while trying to sort this out.

I have been using Incredimail as IMAP for quite a long time now and I realise that you see all your emails both on the server site and on the installed email client, in this case Incredimail.

But what I learned in the end is that without realising it I was storing most of my Incredimail emails I wanted to keep on my PC and not online. I had made a folders within Incredimail to organise them. But what I had not realised was the significance of making these folders under the folder "Local Folders". I now know that all installed email programs seem to have this "Local Folders" feature, maybe that's obvious to most but I never realised. 

Anyway that gave me an idea which I thought was clever but please tell me if you think it will cause me a problem somehow, I'm interested to know whether I have really figured something out or not.

As you know already I was not keen on buying any software to try and move these emails and was hoping to convert them with possibly some freeware which. I found this next to impossible.

I noticed 2 things,

That if I created a folder above the “Local Folders” under my email the folder was reproduced within the server site too (Sky for me) whereas if I made a folder under “Local Folders” it was not.

I noticed that (staring me in the face really) that my emails although in such an awkward format within Incredimal were visible in my server site, in the Inbox for instance so using Imap meant they would be visible in any email program I installed. The problem was the emails in the folders under “Local Folders”, these were not visible on the server site.

Therefore what I did is the following I made folders within Incredimail under my email named the same as the ones within Incredimail under the “Local Folders”. Then within Incredimail I copied the emails from the “Local Folders” folders into the newly created duplicate folders above and of course they then appeared (folders and emails) in the server site (Sky’s email site).

When I now opened Thunderbird email program which I had setup for my email, they all appeared in there too.

So I then created duplicate named folders under the “Local Folders” in Thunderbird and copied the emails into these folders from the folders under my email.

Once this was done I deleted the folders in Incredimail under my email and of course they disappeared from Incredimail, the Sky site and Thunderbird but my emails were now safely in Thunderbird stored locally of course on my PC as they had been within Incredimail.

I’ve simplified what I did above as in reality I had trouble with the quantity of emails that I needed to transfer so I did it as a folder by folder process creating and deleting folders as I went. I found it took sometimes hours for the Incredimail emails to appear within the Sky site (there were a couple of thousand on some folders), but it worked. I would create the folder and put the copied emails in the new folders within Incredimail’s and come back to the PC hours later to find them on the server site. It was much quicker getting them into Thunderbird for some reason.

Mostly all emails transferred perfectly from what I can tell but a few older ones seem to have struggled, they seem to have lots of extra information/characters, as if Thunderbird was a bit confused how to display them but this only happened to a handful on 2 or 3 folders and I can still pick the information out of them.

So was this a brilliant discovery on my part or is there a problem I have not realised here, all seems good so far, I am now using Thunderbird and not Incredimail?

dipsomaniac

I am not a expert on emails but if they are so important you should have a email program like outlook where you can store and back up locally. In all 30 years of emailing I have not got one email I want to keep and try to keep my inbox below 50. I am intrigued as to the content of your thousands of 'must keep' emails

grumpycrab

happyhero said: is there a problem I have not realised here, all seems good so far

Looks like you've sorted it out yourself with your discovery of "Local Folders" (or email-stored-only-on-your-computer).
Here's a question for you.  What happens if Sky's servers blow up and loses all your email?

happyhero

grumpycrab said:

Here's a question for you.  What happens if Sky's servers blow up and loses all your email?

If that happened its not a problem with all my important emails being in the Local folder as I could still access them through Thunderbird couldn't I.

Yes it would be annoying with the ones in my Inbox but important ones get shifted to the Local folders as they come in, so not the end of the world.