On 6/29/2013 5:20 AM, Bob Williams wrote:

My ISP recently had a hardware failure of the machine my messages are stored on. They have rebuilt it from backup, but now Thunderbird shows everything in my Inbox, whereas before my extensive set of filters would divert messages into separate folders. The folder hierarchy was under the ISP account, not Local Folders. I do not have Serverside folders with this account.

I presume I'll have to recreate the original folder structure. I know the usual mantra is "Why not try it?", but I don't want to mess things further if the ISP will eventually restore my folder structure.

I don't quite understand the difference between serverside filtering/folders, locally created folders under an email account, and local folders under 'Local Folders'. The last one seems to delete the mail from the remote server, which is not what I want.

Bob

Thunderbird's handling of Imap has always been suspect if you ask me. I have several Imap accounts where Thunderbird simply refuses to honor IDLED capabilities of the surver, and stops checking mail. Check with your ISP and ask them if they are done. If not, I'd hold out a few days. In Thunderbird, periodically select the account name line in the list of accounts, then select Advanced Features, Manage Folders Subscriptions and hit the refresh button to see if your server-side folders reappear. If they say that WYSIWYG, and they don't intend to try to recover your folders, (first find a new ISP), then go ahead and re-create your directory structures. Use the same exact names as before and your filters should work again. Side note:------------------- If you have always and only used the default Thunderbird install, then your filters would be expected to to be on your machine, because the default install does not manage server side filters. However, some other mail clients DO properly handle server side filters, and there is a add on to Thunderbird to handle server side Sieve filters. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/sieve/ Server side filters are better than client side filters, especially when you read mail at more than one machine or with more than one client. Without server side filters only one machine is able to filter messages, and if you read that account with another machine (or your phone) the mail would not be filtered properly into folders. So if your ISP supports Sieve, you might want to consider converting your filters to ServerSide filters. -- _____________________________________ ---This space for rent--- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

Bob Williams wrote:

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My ISP recently had a hardware failure of the machine my messages are stored on. They have rebuilt it from backup, but now Thunderbird shows everything in my Inbox, whereas before my extensive set of filters would divert messages into separate folders. The folder hierarchy was under the ISP account, not Local Folders. I do not have Serverside folders with this account.

I presume I'll have to recreate the original folder structure. I know the usual mantra is "Why not try it?", but I don't want to mess things further if the ISP will eventually restore my folder structure.

I don't quite understand the difference between serverside filtering/folders, locally created folders under an email account, and local folders under 'Local Folders'. The last one seems to delete the mail from the remote server, which is not what I want.

I use T-bird on windows with the dovecot IMAP server on my suse linux box. If you have an IMAP account, the default is usually that the messages stay on the server even if you download copies. It used to be POP(3) that only supported downloading, but I believe it handles saving messages on the server now as well, but doesn't handle multiple folders like IMAP does. Normally server-side filtering is whatever your ISP offers on their end. I do "server side filtering" mostly on my linux box where I run spamassassin, and have a perl script that sorts incoming email into ~ 70+ folders. I also due axillary spam filtering on on the T-bird client (local side filtering) where it catches most of the ones the server let through. The ones filtered on the server are prefiltered -- when I open up Tbird the mail is already in many different folders. Vs. local filtering is only done after Tbird downloads something from the server -- then it moves things into local folders, usually. Just make sure you don't set messages to expire after some age -- since Tbird will delete the messages off of the server as well as your local client. (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=746350). Other than that, I've never had problems with email disappearing off of an IMAP server. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org