Copying thunderbird search folders

Emin Gabrielyan

2008-09-01

Switzernet

Thunderbird does not permit to copy search folders. We use search folders for monitoring monthly email statistics of billing@ and support@ accounts. For each month and each account, 7 search folders are required. Only the date settings of the 7 search folders change from month to month. Creating a new set of search folders for new months is much easier if a possibility of copying the search folders exists. We present in this document a work around mechanism permitting to create copies of search folders in blocks (without creating them manually from a scratch).

Search folders are stored under “Local Folders” of your thunderbird. In thunderbird main panel, right-click on the “Local Folders” account, and figure out the physical location of this folder on the disk. Browse to the disk location where the search folders are stored. The search folders of a given month are located in a folder called “yymmdd-YYMMDD Month.sbd”, where “yymmdd” is the first date of the month, “YYMMDD” is the last date of the month, and “Month” is the name of the month. There are always 14 files for 7 search folders.

In this document we will show how to create several copies of blocks of 7 search folders for configuring consecutive months. Use the thunderbird interface and move the 7 search folders of December (or the last available month in your thunderbird) to the parent folder “billing”. You can simply drag and drop these 7 folders one by one.

Close thunderbird. Open thunderbird, and close it again.

Be careful to follow the instructions. If you simply close (without re-opening-and-closing-again) thunderbird files on the disk will not be updated.

Move the search folders from the “billing.sbd” to a temporary folder on your desktop. Thus you will delete the files from the thunderbird’s billing.sbd folder.

Open thunderbird. Now you do not have the search folders of December, nor in the December’s subfolder neither in the parent billing subfolder. Close the thunderbird.

You will possibly have undeleted MSF files of search folders in the parent “billing” folder and in the December’s folder. Delete all these files, while thunderbird is closed.

It is especially important to delete the MSF files from “081201-081231 December.sbd” folder. Otherwise, these zombie files will not permit thunderbird to create or move-into the December folder new folders with identical names.

Copy the 14 search folder files from your temporary folder back into the “billing.sbd” folder of thunderbird. Attention, do not move, but copy. You need to keep the copies in your temp folder for the further use.

Open thunderbird, and you will see the search folders restored in the “billing” folder. Make sure that the magnifying glass icon is next to all 7 folders. If the magnifying glass icon is missing, then the folders are corrupted. Use the thunderbird interface, to drag and drop the 7 search folders from the “billing” parent folder back to the “081201-081231 December” folder (or whichever is the last folder in your case). The state of the thunderbird is now restored and the December’s 7 search folders are in their original folder “081201-081231 December”. What we currently have are the 14 files in our temporary folder.

If you cannot drag and drop some of the search folders from the “billing” folder back to the December folder, then you possibly did not delete the zombie MSF files from the December folder (while thunderbird was closed).

Close thunderbird. Open thunderbird, and close it again.

Follow the close-open-close instruction.

With our 14 search folder files we can now clone 7 thunderbird search folders at any time. We can clone them only into thunderbird’s “billing” folder (where from they were taken). Then we have to use thunderbird interface to move the search folders to their final destination (a folder of the corresponding month). Therefore the cloning is possibly only block-by-block. Follow the instructions below:

Copy the 14 search folder files from your temporary folder again into the “billing.sbd” folder of thunderbird. Attention, copy and do not move, you still need to keep the copies in your temp folder for further cloning. The “billing.sbd” folder may have undeleted zombie MSF files, overwrite them when copying.

Open thunderbird. You will see the new copies of the 7 search folders in the parent “billing” folder. Make sure that the search folders are not corrupted (they contain the magnifying glass icon) and conserve all settings of original copies. Create in thunderbird a new “normal” folder for the following month (January 2009 in this example) and drug and drop the search folders to the new month’s folder. For the moment the new month contains a copy of search folders with the date settings of the previous month (you will change the settings later).

Close thunderbird. Open thunderbird, and close it again. Reminder: it is very important to close-open-and-close the thunderbird. It seems, that thunderbird does some file update operations only when the program’s launch time. Simply exiting thunderbird does not ensure that all files are updated.

While thunderbird is closed, you can again copy the 14 files into the “billing.sbd” folder. Overwrite the MSF files, if the “billing.sbd” folder still contains some of the old MSF files. Open thunderbird and you will see another set of new 7 search folders in the “billing” parent folder. Create in thunderbird a new subfolder for the next month (February 2009 in this example) and move (drug-and-drop) the search folders to that month’s subfolder. Close-open-and-close thunderbird program. While thunderbird is closed, copy the 14 files again for the following month.

By repeating this procedure you can create as many sets of 7 search folders as you wish. It remains to configure only the date settings of new search folders.

Make sure also that one single IMAP folder is chosen in your search folders (without IMAP subfolders):

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