thunderbird
[feature suggestion] Exporting messages in subfolders (sorted by sender, year, etc.)
Hi,
And thank you very much for this great add-on!
While using it, I saw the many customisation options for the filename. And there, I thought I’d love to able to add a / (or \ on Windows) and be able to export the messages in subfolders, for instance sorted by sender, or by year.
Maybe it’s already possible (I admittedly didn’t dare trying) or you already dismissed this idea elsewhere (I looked through the feature suggestions and couldn’t find it, but maybe I used the wrong keywords or missed it), in that case apologies for the useless post.
One reason I would have liked this feature is that when exporting many many messages (50k+), sometimes the file explorers (in my case Finder) have a hard time opening folders packed with messages. If they were sorted in subfolders, all this would be easier to process. Of course, I know I could also manually sort the files somehow into folders, but I haven’t found an automated way of doing that (other than archiving, which allows for yearly / monthly storage).
That’s it from me, have a great day!
@SmilingGit Thanks for the kudos! As I think you have seen, the file naming would allow you to search and create such structure post export. With the limitations you mentioned.
I will be honest that implementing such a feature would not be trivial and it's pretty specific. That being said the Quickfilters addon might allow you to create such a structure in your local folders which you could then export. @realraven, any thoughts on this?
@cleidigh
Thank you for your quick reply @cleidigh !
If it’s too much work, don’t worry! I thought maybe if the UI allowed for inserting / or \ (depending on the OS), there would not necessarily be any UI work, but of course maybe the work on the backend could be considerable… If it’s just for me, don’t do it, I can work around it with some scripting.
Thank you also for pointing out @RealRaven2000 ’s https://services.addons.thunderbird.net/eN-US/thunderbird/addon/quickfilters/ I haven’t found a way yet, but it looks indeed very powerful.
All the best!
@cleidigh, just to be sure, I tried exporting with this format, but that didn’t work (unsurprisingly):
${sender_email}/${subject}-${date_custom}-${index}
To be precise: the export worked, it just replaced the "forbidden character" with an underscore _
For anyone coming here and in need of an immediate solution, I guess one could manage to achieve the same result with some post-processing, for instance with hazel or with python or some scripting.
All the best!