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Help to download message bodies for all emails for local storage

  • 4 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 17 views
  • Last reply by christ1

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Greetings. I am running Thunderbird 78.8.1 (64 bit) , and with OWL for Exchange 0.7.7.5. I will be losing access to the mail server with all of my business emails. My goal is to download all emails including the message body to my local drive for future access. I installed and configured Thunderbird with the OWL add-on. It successfully grabbed all emails and folders, but only the message header appears when I work offline. Is there a way to have it automatically download the message body for all of the messages?

I've tried adjusting synch settings with no luck. I also changed the value to "true" for mail.server.default.check_all_folders_for_new in config editor.

Any help is much appreciated.

Greetings. I am running Thunderbird 78.8.1 (64 bit) , and with OWL for Exchange 0.7.7.5. I will be losing access to the mail server with all of my business emails. My goal is to download all emails including the message body to my local drive for future access. I installed and configured Thunderbird with the OWL add-on. It successfully grabbed all emails and folders, but only the message header appears when I work offline. Is there a way to have it automatically download the message body for all of the messages? I've tried adjusting synch settings with no luck. I also changed the value to "true" for mail.server.default.check_all_folders_for_new in config editor. Any help is much appreciated.

All Replies (4)

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I've seen this too, and even the trick to go offline, and being prompted to download all messages for offline use doesn't work here. I guess you'd need to ask the author of the Owl add-on for this. I'd be interested in that information as well.

As a workaround you could copy all messages from the server to your Local Folders account.

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Thank you for the reply. I'm kind of stuck because I don't have direct access to the server.

I emailed Owl. I'll let you know if they respond.

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Looks like it cannot be done. Here is the response from Owl.

"I'm sorry, currently there is no way to sync the mail bodies. Owl was designed to work online. I cannot guarantee you whether this feature will be implemented in the future."

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Thanks for digging up that information. While Owl basically works, it's unfortunate that it's limited in many ways compared to regular IMAP accounts. Not really a workaround, but opening each message in a folder will download the message bodies, and they are kept then.