This thread I am starting here has been prompted by a brief discussion elsewhere on something that I would like to know. That discussion did not resolve the question for me, so I am starting this to see if someone at AskWoody can come up with a practical answer. Besides, I suspect this is not something just I may profit from knowing the answer: While the email client I have in mind is Thunderbird, there could be other ones whose users also might benefit from knowing the corresponding answers.
So what is my question, in particular about Thunderbird?
Let’s say that, for whatever reason, I want to copy emails in my “Inbox” and “Saved” Thunderbird folders to two folders, one for each, in the same computer but outside TB, so not in a TB folder (or of any client you may care about), from where, if I so wished, I could also copy them to an USB drive, then plug this in another computer and copy the two folders there, to have my “sent” an “received” emails in those new and different places and totally outside of TB.
Problem is, I would end up with two folders full of emails, but the information in the names of the email files and other metadata would be absent: when I open the folder containing, let’s say the received emails, all I would see is a bunch of email files with weird names and nothing else.
But when I open, let’s say, the “Inbox” folder in TB I see, not a list of email files with weird names, but a descriptive list of the emails themselves, with columns where the subject of each, who sent it, the date and time when it was received and other useful details, ordered by the topic of one of the columns. (I prefer to have them ordered by date and time, with the most recent on top.)
All that information in those columns is metadata and what I am asking is how to make possible for it to show in such a list when the email files are not in any of the TB’s folders, as just described.
I seem to remember that the metadata is kept, at least in YT, in a file in the same place where all the TB stuff is kept together. For example, in my Mac, that is in:
Finder/Go/Library/Thunderbird/(various sub-folders)
I imagine there is a similar arrangement in Windows and Linux.
But I am not really sure that the metadata file is there, what’s it called, in which format, etc. Knowing that, it would be possible to write a script or a program to read a copy of the file saved in the corresponding external folder along with the email copies and with it create the type of list I have mentioned, each row for a different email saved there and with a clickable link to open it.
Or perhaps there are such things somewhere already available for Macs, Windows and Linux PCs.
So: what about it?
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV
