So I have set up Thunderbird to include a Local Folder on my hard drive on which I copy email folders I want to archive safely. I can of course find and read any archived email by opening the Local Folder from within Thunderbird. But is there any way of retrieving and reading archived emails without doing so through Thunderbird? For instance, I want to copy the entire email archive onto a removable hard disk, so as to be able to consult it from other computers.

I can find Local Folders on my hard disk, and within that a folder called "Archive.sbd". That in turn gives access to documents called, for instance, "emails.2021" and "emails.2021.msf". The problem is that opening document "emails.2021" leads to an unusable mass of binary code. So my question is, can the archived emails only be read from within Thunderbird?