280852 - Provide *easy* way of moving stored mail messages to another folder and/or drive

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Jaroslaw Rafa]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; pl-PL; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; pl-PL; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108 Firefox/1.0

When a profile is created in Thunderbird, all mail messages for this profile are
by default placed in the subdirectory "Mail" of the profile directory.
There is no easy way to move this directory to some other place by "one click".
You have to: first, manually copy the directory contents to some other place;
second, change the directory for each account within a profile (not forgetting
Local Folders) via Tools -> Account configuration window; third, manually tweak
the prefs.js file so that when you add new accounts to the profile, files for
these accounts are created within the new directory and not within the old one;
fourth, delete mail from the old directory.

Why exactly do I need this?
At our company, to avoid problems with data loss when we need to reinstall
Windows on users' PCs (and that happens quite often) we divide disk into two
partitions, and use partition C: exclusively for system and installed software,
and D: for all users' data. So when there's a need for reinstall, we simply
restore the C: partition from a backup image made right after the system was
installed. However, if we'd keep the mail within user's profile directory, it
would be lost in that case, so we need to put the mail directory somewhere on
D:, let's say D:\Mail. In Outlook Express, you go to Tools -> Options -> Service
-> Storage folder (I'm not quite sure about the option names, since I have
Polish version of Windows), select new folder and click "OK". If the new folder
did not exist or is empty, OE even copies the mail from the old folder there (I
don't remember whether it is also deleted from the old directory or not). I'd
like similar feature in Thunderbird.

To clarify, I don't like to move the entire *profile* to another directory (I
have seen some messages related to this here), only the directory where the mail
is stored.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
n/a

Actual Results:  
n/a

Expected Results:  
There should be an option somewhere in the preferences that works similarly to
the one in OE described above.

Comment 1

[jwq]

I believe this is a duplicate of Bug 77924.

Reporter (Jaroslaw): Please check Bug 77924 and mark this bug as a duplicate if
you agree that it is.

Comment 2

[Jaroslaw Rafa]

I'm not sure whether actually consider it as a duplicate, because:
a) bug 77924 refers to Mozilla Suite, and this one to Thunderbird, and this is a
user interface problem, not engine problem, so fixing this in Mozilla Suite does
not necessarily mean fixing it in Thunderbird and vice versa
b) the discussion on bug 77924 refers to moving an entire profile to another
directory, and I meant moving only the mail/news directory, keeping the rest of
the profile where it is.
However, these bugs are clearly related, so I'll add a comment to bug 77924
referring to this bug.

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
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you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
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Comment 4

[jwq]

Prompted by Gerv's automated message, I'm adding a comment.

Jaroslaw, I appreciate what you're trying to do but I think that only shifting
the Mail/News directories from the profile won't help. This is because there is
a lot of user-specific data in the profile, including the user's preferences,
which is necessary for Thunderbird to find and read the data in the Mail/News
directories. I'd suggest that in your case you would probably want to move the
whole profile to the D: drive so that the user's profile isn't overwritten in
the event of a C: drive reinstall.

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I don't see general merit in moving *mail* folder only, but having a way of moving the whole *profile* to another location in the local file system would be really cool, and it doesn't sound very hard.

Do we have a bug for that?

Note that Bug 77924 was wontfixed only because Toolkit ripped out the profile manager, so they are no longer hosting that part. Bug 77924 Comment 24 explicitly allows reopening of that bug for another product/component.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Doing this in a Windows environment can cause untended problems (Windows indexing, AV and other issues). I don't think we should facilitate it via UI.

Comment 7

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I don't think we want to do this no.

Comment 8

[Worcester12345]

Any chances of revisiting this?