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Sync Thunderbird accounts to cloud (sugarsync)

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  • Last reply by Matt

cormie
cormie
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Hey folks, I've got a few email accounts set up on Thunderbird and have what's probably not such a normal set up the mails to gmail, but I also want to back them up to sugarsync, which is the cloud storage service I use at the moment.

Firstly I'll explain how the mails are backed up to Gmail. I needed help over teamviewer from a friend to set this up properly so I'm not too sure of the exact set up, but basically, I think mails sent over the mail server, also send a copy to my personal @gmail account and under a tag of that email address, set up with some kind of filter and then when I reply to mails from the perspective accounts on Thunderbird, my @gmail account is BCC'd by default, so every mail sent and received is now on Gmail. This is handy for looking up mails on the move, but I don't use gmail as a mail client for these particular addresses at all, just a storage, backup and viewing platform.

Thunderbird on the desktop is the mail place I manage all emails and this of course is managed by the files in the thunderbird folder on the laptop, now what I've done is sync the particular folder which contains these files, thinking it would be a quick and simple sync with every new mail I got.

What appears to be happening however, is that the files are being resynced completely and some folder files are about 2gb so it seems thunderbird is ALWAYS syncing in the background, I mean every time I've looked at the system tray since I set it up a few months ago, the icon has been orange for "uploading" and it's always the mail files that are the ones syncing when I check.

This is clearly not efficient and I'm also not confident that the files I'm trying to back up are ever fully completing their backing up, so I don't know how up to date the actual files on the cloud are.

I'm guessing there is a much better way to go about this, but the end goal would be to still have mails showing in gmail (I can stop this any time as it's not really related), but also have the updated files in the cloud as soon as new mails are received, but even if it was to be just once every few hours, it would probably still be better than the current set up and I guess all I'd ever be losing would be a few hours work?

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

Hey folks, I've got a few email accounts set up on Thunderbird and have what's probably not such a normal set up the mails to gmail, but I also want to back them up to sugarsync, which is the cloud storage service I use at the moment. Firstly I'll explain how the mails are backed up to Gmail. I needed help over teamviewer from a friend to set this up properly so I'm not too sure of the exact set up, but basically, I think mails sent over the mail server, also send a copy to my personal @gmail account and under a tag of that email address, set up with some kind of filter and then when I reply to mails from the perspective accounts on Thunderbird, my @gmail account is BCC'd by default, so every mail sent and received is now on Gmail. This is handy for looking up mails on the move, but I don't use gmail as a mail client for these particular addresses at all, just a storage, backup and viewing platform. Thunderbird on the desktop is the mail place I manage all emails and this of course is managed by the files in the thunderbird folder on the laptop, now what I've done is sync the particular folder which contains these files, thinking it would be a quick and simple sync with every new mail I got. What appears to be happening however, is that the files are being resynced completely and some folder files are about 2gb so it seems thunderbird is ALWAYS syncing in the background, I mean every time I've looked at the system tray since I set it up a few months ago, the icon has been orange for "uploading" and it's always the mail files that are the ones syncing when I check. This is clearly not efficient and I'm also not confident that the files I'm trying to back up are ever fully completing their backing up, so I don't know how up to date the actual files on the cloud are. I'm guessing there is a much better way to go about this, but the end goal would be to still have mails showing in gmail (I can stop this any time as it's not really related), but also have the updated files in the cloud as soon as new mails are received, but even if it was to be just once every few hours, it would probably still be better than the current set up and I guess all I'd ever be losing would be a few hours work? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

All Replies (1)

Matt
Matt
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You appear to have invested a lot of effort to do what IMAP mail does automatically. Just not to your "chosen" cloud backup provider, but to your chosen mail provider.

IMAP mail is fully synchronized on a mail by mail basis. I really think you need to investigate it's use on all your accounts, rather than look for what is essentially a streaming backup of Thunderbird.

While some of the things you see in Thunderbird are different with IMAP, the inconvenience is outweighed by the automatic nature of the synchronization.