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Back Up IMAP Folders to NAS (with live access)

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  • Last reply by Matt

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Greetings, Tbirders,

I'm trying to find a way to archive IMAP folders from multiple accounts for the purpose of historical record and reference to my NAS, but still have the content accessible via two or three machines.

I've tried the 'local folders' extension, but it seems that it doesn't work well with two or more machines and I lose the indexing, so that when a second machine accesses the folder, something 'breaks' and the messages disappear.

Would using the native Tbird 'archive' function work if I were to point the respective accounts to a corresponding folder to my NAS? Basically, I'm just trying to find a way to offload messages from local machines to my NAS and as a bonus, back up the server to the cloud by way of disaster recovery.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Greetings, Tbirders, I'm trying to find a way to archive IMAP folders from multiple accounts for the purpose of historical record and reference to my NAS, but still have the content accessible via two or three machines. I've tried the 'local folders' extension, but it seems that it doesn't work well with two or more machines and I lose the indexing, so that when a second machine accesses the folder, something 'breaks' and the messages disappear. Would using the native Tbird 'archive' function work if I were to point the respective accounts to a corresponding folder to my NAS? Basically, I'm just trying to find a way to offload messages from local machines to my NAS and as a bonus, back up the server to the cloud by way of disaster recovery. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

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Archiving is a mess is the short answer. The more we strive to retain things the more they slip through our fingers.

Really the best "roll your own" approach using a NAS is probably to run an IMAP mail server instance on the NAS and use that as an account in Thunderbird to manage your archives. Or If you have a business need for reliable archives deploy a real mail archive solution. The following link is from google and is offered simply to illustrate what I mean as a "real" archiving solution. https://www.g2.com/categories/email-archiving