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Back Up Thunderbird Message Filters
Published: 15-12-2013 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
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This tutorial shows you how to backup and restore the mail message filters in
Thunderbird on multiple platforms. The filters are in a plain text file located
in your thunderbird Profile folder. On Mac OS X for example this is under the
/Users/<username>/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/<profile>/ImapMail/<mailserver>/
folder. (If you use IMAP.)
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The file is named msgFilterRules.dat and the contents look a bit like this:
version="9"
logging="no"
name="From is: dan@sixgun.org"
enabled="yes"
type="17"
action="Move to folder"
actionValue="imap://user%40host.com@imap.server.com/Folder"
condition="AND (from,is,dan@sixgun.org)"
The above example moves any email coming from the email address dan@sixgun.org
to the folder Folder on the IMAp account.
To back up all the filters, do the following:
- Close all instances of Thunderbird
- Copy the file
msgFilterRules.datto a backup location.
To restore the file, to the following:
- Close all instances of Thunderbird
- Copy the file
msgFilterRules.datback into your (possibly new) profile folder
Under any normal Linux distro the path probably is like this:
/home/<username>/.thunderbird/Profiles/<profile>/ImapMail/<mailserver>/msgFilterRules.dat
For Mac OS X the path is like this:
/Users/<username>/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/<profile>/ImapMail/<mailserver>/msgFilterRules.dat
For Windows the path probably is like this on pre Vista machines:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\<profile>\ImapMail\<mailserver>\msgFilterRules.dat
The latter versions of Windows (vista, 7, 8):
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\<profile>\ImapMail\<mailserver>\msgFilterRules.dat
If you want to convert these Thunderbird rules to .procmailrc rules a script
for that can be found here:
http://sourceforge.net/p/tbprocmailconv/code/HEAD/tree/tbprocmailconv.py