Improving email archiving for Thunderbird

[pedja]

As time goes by local email database becomes larger. Thunderbird start to struggle with large database. most evident issue is it slows down, but occasionally, database corruptions occur.

There is archiving option that could help solving an issue but it needs some improvements:

It is big limitation that user must actually select messages to archive. If user has messages sorted by number of folders (usually with some filtering rules) it is nuisance to the level of not being usable - one has to open each subfolder, select messages and archive them.

It wold be good to have option to run archiving on folder, but with some date based rules, so for example, user can have all messages older than two years moved to archive without need to find them and select each of them manually.

Next improvement would be option to run Archiving automatically, similarly to automatic deletion. Almost the same principle may be applied: option to set archiving rules for each folder based on message age.

Actually, I would repurpose automatic date based deletion rules with archiving. That means, messages could be automatically archived date based, and some of them deleted on another date based rules.

I do not know inner workings of Thunderbird but it looks to me like simple duplication options for automatic deleting messages but instead of deleting, those rules would move messages to Archive.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[Spencer]

Your recommendations are good. I wonder if Mozilla will address this?

[pedja]

I found plugin that does help https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/autoarchivereloaded/

However it has some limitations.

[MongoTuslan]

I would also like to see some improvements to reduce the likelihood of database corruption.  Over the years, I have had to recover from database corruption, some times not fully successfully, and I have developed some habits which seem to help:  1) Compact folders every day.  It is helpful that the Files menu has a Compact Folders item that will compact subfolders and this is a timesaver, but it doesn't compact every top folder; each and every top folder has to be selected and compacted individually.  2)  Make frequent backups.  I use the Portable Edition, so I just archive the whole Thunderbird folder.  3) Properties -> Repair every subfolder that gets heavy use on a frequent basis.  There is no Repair Folders function, so every subfolder has to be selected and repaired individually which is time consuming.  I would like to see Compact and Repair made a background task so I don't have to spend my user time clicking on these.  

[MongoTuslan]

I have to report that the File > Compact Folders item no longer compacts subfolders of the selected folder.  Now, I have to select and compact every subfolder individually, which is very tedious.  I find that going very long without compacting folders results in folder corruption and sometimes loss of messages.  Usually, the Properties > Repair item recovers from the corruption, but this has to be performed individually for every folder.  I would like to see File > Compact Folders fixed to compact all subfolders again.  I would also like to see an equivalent function for Repair of all subfolders.  Even better would be a feature where these functions would be performed in the background continuously and transparently to the user.  

[Sergio3N]

I also suggest adding the Archive option in the "Filter Actions" to be able to create a filter that directly archives some mail messages with a particular subject without selecting them every time in the inbox and pressing the "A" key.

I currently use a filter set to "mark as read" and "move to folder" but every year I have to remember to change the filter...