I have e-mail messages from my children dating back to the 80's. How can I find, select by folder, and then move the messages to a text file?
I migrated from Eudora to Thunderbird years ago and kept messages in archive files named for the sender. Both received and sent mail are archived together so reading messages in the archive, organized by date, is like looking at a conversation. My children are now approaching 50 and I would like to be able to recover these e-mail messages in a lengthy text file so I can gift them a sort of book containing our very long period of conversation.
Is this possible and, if so, how is it to be done?
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First of all I'd try setting up a Saved Search folder, using one or more filters to collate all the likely messages. If this makes a reasonably good job of identifying all the messages of interest, all well and good. If not, I'd create a real folder and use my filters to copy messages into it. This has the benefit that you can manually add and remove messages as you see fit.
Having collected all the likely messages, I'd use the ImportExportTools add-on to export them to text files.
After that, it's a lot of manual work to copy and paste content into a new document. You could use a word processor to put it all together by hand.
You will have tools to hand to help here, but if you're not familiar with using the command line this will seem strange.
Here in Linux, I could open the folder containing all the text files in a command prompt window and do this:
cat *.txt >> messages.txt
This will list all the files whose names end with .txt and add their contents, end to end, into the text file messages.txt.
IIRC, in Windows, the equivalent would be
type *.txt >> messages.txt
Now you have all your messages in one file. They might not be in the right order, but you can sort that out in a word processor. Wordpad might do the job, or you can download a free word processor, such as Libre Office.