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Thunderbird 1.5

January 27, 2006 on 12:25 pm | In IdBlog, Tools | Add a Comment

This morning I upgraded my mail client from Thunderbird 1.0 to Thunderbird 1.5. Mozilla released the new version a few weeks ago. The upgrade was seamless; my old settings and folders were transferred to the new version without any effort on my part.

The new version has better spam filters and security safeguards, but it still doesn’t have a save as text or export function. After using Eudora for years, I got used to being able to archive my e-mail simply by selecting a batch of messages and clicking save as text. That generated a nice, clean plain text file for my archive. Other programs allow you to export a block of messages as text. Not T-bird.

There is a workaround, however. If you go to
C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\whatever.default\Mail\ you should be able to locate the file where Thunderbird saves the mail. Open that file with Notepad or Wordpad and save it out as text. Just make sure you strip out attachments and images first, or you’ll be looking at a lot of binary code translated to ASCII gobbledygook.

Thunderbird is an excellent program. It’s surprising that it lacks such a simple feature.