Who are you planning on using for your email provider after you quit ATT?

I have signed up with Spectrum/Charter Communications to provide Internet service. They have an e-mail service but it is have few bells and whistles, so I thought that I would use Thunderbird and link Spectrum/Charter e-mail to Thunderbird, I am assuming that this is possible.

Thunderbird will work with most providers.

Are you using POP or IMAP with AT&T?

Archive info. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/archived-messages

I am using POP. I have already set up my Thunderbird account and transferred all of my incoming e-mail there. I guess I could move all of my e-mails out of their separate folders and back into the Inbox, once there I could just go back through the Import process. Once all of the e-mail is moved I can then move them into new folders on Thunderbird. That still leaves me with the original problem and that is how to move old e-mails into an archive file on my computer that can be saved and later opened within another e-mail server

POP messages reside on your local drive already but they are still associated with the old email account. If you remove the account from Thunderbird the messages disappear. The safe way is to create folders under the Thunderbird Local Folders account and move those messages there

You keep saying archive. Did you read the article on Thunderbird archive. That might work for you as long as you specify the archive folders are to be in Local Folders and not under the AT&T account.

According to the twit at AT&T all of the e-mail, the e-mail folders as well as the e-mails I archive are all on their mail server and not storied on my computer. Once archived the e-mail is basically put into another folder along with the other folders. This according to them is a benefit which allows me to access any e-mail from any computer including those that have been archived. Back in the olden days when I was using Outlook or Outlook Express I could select a group of e-mails and select Archive and it would build a file and allow me to store that file anywhere I wanted, including to a DVD for safe storage and access by Outlook on any computer. According to their Tech Support person AT&T doesn't actually have an e-mail server, they use a third party server and just in case you were wondering, the Tech didn't know who it was that supplies the server or what software was being used.

What you are describing is how IMAP works. Are you sure you are using POP? If you go into Thunderbird account settings does it say POP or IMAP? AT&T uses Yahoo like a growing number of providers.

Under Server Settings it states, POP Mail Server

Sorry I am so late getting back. It I am on vacation and spent all day yesterday crossing the state of Kanas in 104 ° F heat. Now in the cooler mountains of Colorado but Internet is sporatic. This is not a bad thing. Post here if you still need help and I will message another volunteer to help.

I am still fighting this same battle, any help would be appreciated

I would recommend you set this account up a second time, but using IMAP. Then you will be able to see all the folders.

https://forums.att.com/t5/AT-T-Internet-Email-Security/Does-AT-amp-T-still-support-and-have-iMAP-mail-services/td-p/3601933 https://www.att.com/esupport/article.html#!/dsl-high-speed/KM1010523

You are not there yet; these folders and their contents are still on the ATT server, and the only way to make sure you have your own copies of them is to make copies in another account.

I would also recommend you consider moving away from using the email account offered by your ISP. As you are now finding, this means when you switch ISP you also have to switch email address, and apart from the current challenge with transferral of your data you'll need to notify everyone concerned about your change of address. If you use an email provider who is independent of your ISP you'll never have these concerns again.

Now, you don't yet have a new email account with your new ISP because you haven't transferred to them yet. And you will lose access to the ATT account when you do transfer. Under these conditions it is very unlikely that you'll have have access to both old and new accounts at the same time. So to save the data in your ATT account, you need to move this data to some other location.

Your options are the Local Folders account in Thunderbird, or a new account with an independent provider. The obvious choices for alternative email providers are Gmail, Microsoft's bewildering range of services (outlook/hotmail/live mail), AOL, Yahoo. I use GMX (aka "1and1"). I have a longstanding aversion to AOL, I don't trust Yahoo given their poor response to their security breach a couple of years ago, and frankly we have a continuous stream of issues with them. Google are competent and efficient. All of them, notably Google, may collect information about you. GMX is possibly the least invasive of those I have listed here.

You might also look for a specialist email provider who could provide you with your own customized email address (and domain) but at a price. However if you pay, you should receive a higher standard of service and enjoy little or no data collection about your online activity. Maybe Tucows or GoDaddy, but often a small local operator gives better and more personal service. Being in the UK, I use a UK-based provider for my own domain.

However, I digress. To summarize:

1. Set up the ATT account in Thunderbird using IMAP
2. Copy all your old data to somewhere else; Thunderbird's Local Folders account is the "least effort" location for this.

The major caveat with Local Folders is that it is on your machine. That means you cannot access these messages from any other computer, and this being the sole copy of these records, you need to think about backup in case your machine breaks.

You could continue moving messages to Inbox in webmail and then moving them In Thunderbird from the POP-connected account, but personally I would find this intolerably slow, tedious and error-prone.

I appreciate the time you put into this response but the real problem remains with AT&T. Your paragraph number 5 is the root of the problem, according to the geniuses at AT&T there is no way to save the e-mails from their e-mail server to anywhere else. As I stated in and earlier comment back in the days of Outlook and Outlook Express it was possible to save all of your e-mails in an archive file on your local hard drive that could be even be stored on a USB stick and opened on another computer. This is what I am trying to do; archive the e-mails on my AT&T e-mail account to my local hard drive so that I can re-open them within Thunderbird. AT&T allows you to archive your e-mail but they are saved on their e-mail server and not downloadable to anywhere.

It's horribly clumsy, but you could go to the webmail, move all the messages from Sent to Inbox, then in Thunderbird move them all to Sent.

Are you sure the webmail system doesn't let you export messages to a file, which you could download to your PC?

Just to cut through some of the fuzziness, if the account uses POP and you can see messages, then they are on your PC and none of this downloading stuff applies.

Can you not set this account up again using IMAP? Is the ATT account not Yahoo under the hood? This site says it's run by Yahoo.

If you were talking about a hotmail account and Outlook Express then I'd believe that some magical download may have been possible, because they used non-standard protocols, so the limitations of POP we are talking about here wouldn't necessarily apply. But POP can only see the Inbox. No other folders are available via POP, and anyway, this is not a hotmail account.