Synchronizing Mailpile with Thunderbird
This is a technical method of synchronizing with Thunderbird. If you use the mail sources setup, you can achieve the same result in a much simpler way. This documentation might help if you're trying to do something weird.
A lot of people use Thunderbird (or Icedove) as their main mail application, and may wish to use Thunderbird as their mail importer and frontend during this phase in the development of Mailpile. There are two things Mailpile can import from Thunderbird presently: Thunderbird's mboxes, which contain mail, and its Mork databases, which are contact address books.
Your Thunderbird data resides in your Thunderbird profile directory, this is in different places on different operating systems:
- On Windows
\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\<Profile name>\ - On MacOS
~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/<Profile name>/ - Other MacOS
~/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird/Profiles/<Profile name>/ - And on other systems
~/.thunderbird/<Profile name>
The <Profile name> part is the name of the profile, since you can have multiple profiles in Thunderbird. Generally this name is something like a1b2c3de.default - i.e., some random characters. If you have multiple profiles, you might need to dig around a bit to find the one you want.
In the profile directory, there are folders called Mail, which contains POP3 mail, and ImapMail which contains your IMAP folders. In those directories there will two files and possibly a directory for each folder represented in Thunderbird's folder list. The file with a ".msf" ending can be ignored, but the other file, with no particular ending, is a mailbox that you may wish to index.
The directory will have a ".sbd" ending, and inside it you will find any subfolders in the same format.
If you are using Linux or MacOS, you can find all of the mail directories by running:
$ find . -name "*.msf" | sed 's:.msf::'
from the Mail or ImapMail. Remember to expand to the full path.
Once you have the directories, add them to Mailpile using the add command, e.g.:
mailpile> add ~/.thunderbird/a1b2c3de.default/ImapMail/mail.example.com/INBOX
Do this once for each directory.
Note that if you're using Thunderbird as an IMAP client, you need to make sure Thunderbird downloads all the mail. To do so, go to Thunderbird's settings, choose Synchronization & Storage, and hit Advanced. There, make sure all the relevant folders are checked as "Download".
Thunderbird stores your contacts in two places in the profile: a file called abook.mab, and one called history.mab. The difference here is that abook.mab contains the address book that you have created through your interactions in Thunderbird, whereas history.mab has addresses that Thunderbird has collected from your e-mail.
To add them to Mailpile, use the prefs.vcard.importers.mork attribute in the settings. Simplest is to go to the Mailpile command line and type, e.g.:
mailpile> set prefs.vcard.importers.mork.0.filename = ~/.thunderbird/a1b2c3de.default/abook.mab
The 0 there is the number of the importer. If you have more than one Mork file, remember to increase that number for each one.
Once you've done all of this, just rescan and you'll be on your way.