Normally I'm a pretty smart guy with computers, but right now I'm going through chemotherapy treatments, so there's a lot of mental confusion. I did try to look up the answer in Thunderbird help and by searching this forum, so my apologies if I missed something simple.
Anyway, the mail account I had been using is being dropped, and I needed to scramble to save all my messages elsewhere, and deal with them later. I successfully downloaded over 2200 messages (some with attachments) into Portable Thunderbird, and they're stored on my thumb drive. The next day when I started up Thunderbird, it started downloading all the messages into memory from my thumb drive, which took a long time. I let things run overnight, and it's still stuck on message 2219 of 2221, still displaying "Loading Message..." and the progress bar keeps moving.
Immediate question: How to gracefully stop things? I see no button or menu choice to stop or cancel the action, and Ctrl-C, Ctrl-Break, and Escape have no effect.
Next question: How do I prevent this happening the next time I open Thunderbird? Do I move the messages to a different folder, or something? Today is the last day I have access to my old mail server, so I just want to store the messages somewhere I can retrieve them later.
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If it's still 'loading' then the messages are not local. They're on the remote server and Thunderbird has a synced copy of them.
You should copy them to the folders within "Local Folders" within Thunderbird. This will create permanent copies locally.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I just checked...when it's loading locally-stored messages, it just says 'Loading Message...'.
When it's loading IMAP messages It says 'Loading Message...' and then it says 'Downloading Message...'. Downloading Message is where it hangs if it's a big message
If it's hanging on Loading Message, it's a different problem.
OK, it turns out the hangup was because it was trying to download from the server at a time my dial-up connection had temporarily been lost.
I'm closed out of that email server now, so I've got all the email messages from it that I'll ever get. I want to preserve them in their own folders, separate from anything I set up in the future for accessing my current email accounts.
I had downloaded the messages using POP3, and told it not to store in my global inbox, so right now it looks kind of like this image from the gunnars.net tutorial:
http://mozilla.gunnars.net/img/window-w-multiple-accounts
I've read some things about how storing messages in subdirectories under "Local Folders" will make them be treated differently, but I'm not clear just how. I think John was suggesting that I move the messages to folders under "Local Folders." Does that sound like the right approach for me? And, if I do so, do I want to copy, or just move, the messages? It seems to me that copying would mean a bit more wear and tear on my thumb drive, since for a while two copies of each message would exist. On the other hand, that might be a little safer, to make sure no messages get lost in the transition?
I won't want Thunderbird to try to retrieve anything else from that mail server, so I'm wondering if it's best if I delete the account once I've got the messages moved. If I do that, will deleting the account also delete the message folders associated with the account?
Thanks for the help so far, and hope you can point me in the right direction.
Rick Carter