Dominique Stender Good software is only the beginning…

Syncing / merging Thunderbird mailbox files

When I shifted to India seven months ago I took my netbook with me and sent my work horse desktop computer by cargo. Due to several circumstances - one of them being the trouble of getting reliable broadband access - I kept reading and writing my mails from the netbook, even long after the desktop had arrived.

Now was the time to do the transition back to the desktop. I had kept all my mails on the mail server during the whole time, so my inbox would be in sync just by downloading all mails. But I wanted to have access to those mails I had sent as well.

Thunderbird has no inbuilt option to migrate or merge messages from a file into your existing account. Worse, there are no provisions to keep two Thunderbird installations in sync.

Luckily Thunderbird uses the mbox file format to store the mails of a folder such as the Inbox or Sent in a single file. The format is widely used, especially in the *nix world.

With a bit of research I found that I was not the only person with this problem and even better I found the blog by Paul Betts containing an article "Merge Thunderbird / Evolution style (mbox) folders".