I use Thunderbird on Windows 10 and Google GMail which is full.

I want to do the least amount of thinking possible so I do not
want to go through thousands of emails to delete those no longer
needed - but I need to clear out the IMAP folders on Google servers.
Without deleting.

What I did, thinking I was a genius, was I created yearly local folders.
TB: Local Folder > New Folder > {2016,2017,2018,etc}

Then I sorted the Thunderbird Gmail Inbox by date & I shift-selected
every Inbox email that came in during any given year, say for 2017.

TB: (Selected Set) > Rightclick Move to > Local Folders > 2017
where it says "Moving x of 6347 messages to 2017 and takes a while.

But then the mail is still in the inbox.
What did I do wrong?

I get it's IMAP.
But doesn't the move take care of that?

Or do I have to then DELETE the mail in the inbox that I moved.
I am asking before I do it just to make sure it's the right thing to do.

Or is there an easier way to move Thunderbird emails, to yearly
folders that are stored only on the Windows PC file system?

Nick Cine wrote:
[..snip..]
> What I did, thinking I was a genius, was I created yearly local folders.
> TB: Local Folder > New Folder > {2016,2017,2018,etc}
>
> Then I sorted the Thunderbird Gmail Inbox by date & I shift-selected
> every Inbox email that came in during any given year, say for 2017.
>
> TB: (Selected Set) > Rightclick Move to > Local Folders > 2017
> where it says "Moving x of 6347 messages to 2017 and takes a while.
>
> But then the mail is still in the inbox.
> What did I do wrong?

First idea: right click on the inbox and select "compact".

On 2/19/24 03:27 PM, Nick Cine wrote:
> I use Thunderbird on Windows 10 and Google GMail which is full.
>
> I want to do the least amount of thinking possible so I do not
> want to go through thousands of emails to delete those no longer
> needed - but I need to clear out the IMAP folders on Google servers.
> Without deleting.
>
> What I did, thinking I was a genius, was I created yearly local folders.
> TB: Local Folder > New Folder > {2016,2017,2018,etc}
>
> Then I sorted the Thunderbird Gmail Inbox by date & I shift-selected
> every Inbox email that came in during any given year, say for 2017.
>
> TB: (Selected Set) > Rightclick Move to > Local Folders > 2017
> where it says "Moving x of 6347 messages to 2017 and takes a while.
>
> But then the mail is still in the inbox.
> What did I do wrong?
>
> I get it's IMAP.
> But doesn't the move take care of that?
>
> Or do I have to then DELETE the mail in the inbox that I moved.
> I am asking before I do it just to make sure it's the right thing to do.
>
> Or is there an easier way to move Thunderbird emails, to yearly
> folders that are stored only on the Windows PC file system?
Try 2018 and do one month at a time. Too many to move at once??? There might be a limit. I move
emails around with drag and drop, should work.
--
Linux Mint 21.3 Cinnamon 6.0.4
Al

Nick Cine wrote:
> I use Thunderbird on Windows 10 and Google GMail which is full.
>
> I want to do the least amount of thinking possible so I do not
> want to go through thousands of emails to delete those no longer
> needed - but I need to clear out the IMAP folders on Google servers.
> Without deleting.
>
> What I did, thinking I was a genius, was I created yearly local folders.
> TB: Local Folder > New Folder > {2016,2017,2018,etc}
>
> Then I sorted the Thunderbird Gmail Inbox by date & I shift-selected
> every Inbox email that came in during any given year, say for 2017.
>
> TB: (Selected Set) > Rightclick Move to > Local Folders > 2017
> where it says "Moving x of 6347 messages to 2017 and takes a while.
>
> But then the mail is still in the inbox.
> What did I do wrong?
>
> I get it's IMAP.
> But doesn't the move take care of that?
>
> Or do I have to then DELETE the mail in the inbox that I moved.
> I am asking before I do it just to make sure it's the right thing to do.
>
> Or is there an easier way to move Thunderbird emails, to yearly
> folders that are stored only on the Windows PC file system?
>

1) The archive function in Thunderbird with automatically create yearly
folders for you. No need to do this manually

2) Right-click on the IMAP account and select settings. Under 'Copies &
Folders' under 'Message Archives' change from '"Archives" Folder on:'
IMAP Account to 'Other:' and select 'Local Folders' (You can also add a
subfolder where you can separate archived accounts if you wish to
archive more than one IMAP account locally)

3) Click the 'Archive Options...' button to select the individual year
option

4) Because IMAP and performance depends on your bandwidth, as Big Al
suggested just archive in batches. You don't have to sort, Thunderbird
will place messages into their respective year folders.

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

Nick Cine wrote:
> I use Thunderbird on Windows 10 and Google GMail which is full.
>
> I want to do the least amount of thinking possible so I do not
> want to go through thousands of emails to delete those no longer
> needed - but I need to clear out the IMAP folders on Google servers.
> Without deleting.
>
> What I did, thinking I was a genius, was I created yearly local folders.
> TB: Local Folder > New Folder > {2016,2017,2018,etc}
>
> Then I sorted the Thunderbird Gmail Inbox by date & I shift-selected
> every Inbox email that came in during any given year, say for 2017.
[..snip..]

Let me get this straight. You reached the maximum capacity of your Google
IMAP account, 15GB right?
But you don't want to "go through thousands of emails to delete those no
longer needed"? So you just try to download those emails? These emails
"no longer needed" - what for?
Of course you can build up a pile of trash in your home. Physically and
virtual; some call it "messie".

On 2/19/2024 6:12 PM, Jonathan N. Little wrote:
> Nick Cine wrote:
>> I use Thunderbird on Windows 10 and Google GMail which is full.
>>
>> I want to do the least amount of thinking possible so I do not
>> want to go through thousands of emails to delete those no longer
>> needed - but I need to clear out the IMAP folders on Google servers.
>> Without deleting.
>>
>> What I did, thinking I was a genius, was I created yearly local folders.
>> TB: Local Folder > New Folder > {2016,2017,2018,etc}
>>
>> Then I sorted the Thunderbird Gmail Inbox by date & I shift-selected
>> every Inbox email that came in during any given year, say for 2017.
>>
>> TB: (Selected Set) > Rightclick Move to > Local Folders > 2017
>> where it says "Moving x of 6347 messages to 2017 and takes a while.
>>
>> But then the mail is still in the inbox.
>> What did I do wrong?
>>
>> I get it's IMAP.
>> But doesn't the move take care of that?
>>
>> Or do I have to then DELETE the mail in the inbox that I moved.
>> I am asking before I do it just to make sure it's the right thing to do.
>>
>> Or is there an easier way to move Thunderbird emails, to yearly
>> folders that are stored only on the Windows PC file system?
>>
>
> 1) The archive function in Thunderbird with automatically create yearly
> folders for you. No need to do this manually
>
> 2) Right-click on the IMAP account and select settings. Under 'Copies &
> Folders' under 'Message Archives' change from '"Archives" Folder on:'
> IMAP Account to 'Other:' and select 'Local Folders' (You can also add a
> subfolder where you can separate archived accounts if you wish to
> archive more than one IMAP account locally)
>
> 3) Click the 'Archive Options...' button to select the individual year
> option
>
> 4) Because IMAP and performance depends on your bandwidth, as Big Al
> suggested just archive in batches. You don't have to sort, Thunderbird
> will place messages into their respective year folders.
>

Sometimes, the response you get in an email session, it's limited by
the server end, and not the client end. There is that possibility.

We don't want to blame local hardware, unless it really is at fault :-)

In Windows, if the whole operation is taking a long time, you can use
Task Manager and the memory tab to get some idea whether the operation
is using a lot of RAM. While the OP reports "6347 messages", some users
have abnormally large average message sizes (attachments).

Paul

On 2/19/2024 9:22 PM, Frank Miller wrote:
> Nick Cine wrote:
>> I use Thunderbird on Windows 10 and Google GMail which is full.
>>
>> I want to do the least amount of thinking possible so I do not
>> want to go through thousands of emails to delete those no longer
>> needed - but I need to clear out the IMAP folders on Google servers.
>> Without deleting.
>>
>> What I did, thinking I was a genius, was I created yearly local folders.
>> TB: Local Folder > New Folder > {2016,2017,2018,etc}
>>
>> Then I sorted the Thunderbird Gmail Inbox by date & I shift-selected
>> every Inbox email that came in during any given year, say for 2017.
> [..snip..]
>
> Let me get this straight. You reached the maximum capacity of your Google
> IMAP account, 15GB right?
> But you don't want to "go through thousands of emails to delete those no
> longer needed"? So you just try to download those emails? These emails
> "no longer needed" - what for?
> Of course you can build up a pile of trash in your home. Physically and
> virtual; some call it "messie".
>

If this is the case [15GB of email], Google Takeout may offer a way to transfer the
content to the home computer. And then set about deleting the materials
from the server. Due to the potential size of the content, this may end up
shipped as more than one ZIP file. Text email should compress well, but
content which is mostly attachments, could be a lot less compressible for
shipment.

[ The "limit" and the "consequences" ]
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9312312?hl=en

"How to download your Google data"
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en#zippy=%2Chow-do-i-locate-my-exported-takeout-data

https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

"Google Takeout provides email in the . MBOX format"

By allows a problem to fester for this long, this is
"borderline data recovery", due to bumping your head
on limitations caused by being so close to the 15GB limitation.

That's why I would suggest a "precautionary" Takeout operation
so all the information is stored at home, and you have a copy
of everything... before you "try and try to clean up". I don't
view this as necessarily all that easy, because, after all, this
is Google ("home of no customer support and fuck-you attitude").

Paul

On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 21:54:38 -0500, Paul wrote:

> If this is the case [15GB of email], Google Takeout may offer a way to transfer the
> content to the home computer. And then set about deleting the materials
> from the server. Due to the potential size of the content, this may end up
> shipped as more than one ZIP file. Text email should compress well, but
> content which is mostly attachments, could be a lot less compressible for
> shipment.

The problem with Google Takeout isn't so much that you have the choice of a
single astoundingly huge zip file or a bunch of smaller zip files...

....No...

The problem with Google Takeout is the result is completely unreadable.
Hence worthless.

....Try it...

On Tue, 20 Feb 2024 03:22:52 +0100, Frank Miller wrote:

> Let me get this straight. You reached the maximum capacity of your Google
> IMAP account, 15GB right?
> But you don't want to "go through thousands of emails to delete those no
> longer needed"? So you just try to download those emails?

There are two kinds of people.

The first kind knows they'll NEVER need an email from 2017 to 2020 (or so).
The other kind has no idea if they'll ever need to look up an email in that
time range.

You're of the former.
I'm of the latter.

On 2/19/2024 9:27 PM, Nick Cine wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Feb 2024 03:22:52 +0100, Frank Miller wrote:
>
>> Let me get this straight. You reached the maximum capacity of your Google
>> IMAP account, 15GB right?
>> But you don't want to "go through thousands of emails to delete those no
>> longer needed"? So you just try to download those emails?
>
> There are two kinds of people.
>
> The first kind knows they'll NEVER need an email from 2017 to 2020 (or so).
> The other kind has no idea if they'll ever need to look up an email in that
> time range.
>
> You're of the former.
> I'm of the latter.

I would have to agree with finding it hard to question someone who has a
large amount of email saved. I still have ALL the email from when I
retired over a decade ago, as well as thousands of work pictures and
files. On several occasions I have been called by my former employee to
help settle disputes with various subcontractors, even ending up in
court. In fact, on one case I went to court over 50 times on a case
that went all the way to our states Supreme Court on appeal. We won
every time, and might not have if I wasn't such a stickler for keeping
all that stuff.

--
Stand With Israel!
NOTE: If you use Google Groups I don't see you,
unless you're whitelisted and that's doubtful.

NOTE: Not a Windows 10 issue, so I removed that newsgroup in my reply.

Nick Cine <nickcine@is.invalid> wrote:

> I use Thunderbird on Windows 10 and Google GMail which is full.

Wow, you consumed all 15GB of your Google account's storage quota just
with e-mails? You really need to clean out the garbage. Not every
e-mail you ever received or sent has value in the future. You have not
been maintaining your account.

However, your Google account's storage quota is shared between their
Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive services. It's 15GB for all
storage across all their services. If you store lots of images in
Google Photo, or lots of files in Google Drive, those reduce how much is
left for Gmail.

The Inbox folder is not intended to operate as an archive folder.
Delete items no longer value, or move them into an archive folder (which
now you're doing) when they no longer are new messages, but ancient
messages that no longer belong in the Inbox folder.

> I want to do the least amount of thinking possible so I do not want to
> go through thousands of emails to delete those no longer needed - but
> I need to clear out the IMAP folders on Google servers. Without
> deleting.

You can use filtering in your local e-mail client to pick a range on
which subset of messages to work on in one cleanup session, and repeat
when you later want to perform another cleanup session. You don't have
to cleanup all at once. Incremental cleanup isn't so painful, but you
should be doing it at much shorter intervals, so there is far less to
cleanup at a time.

> What I did, thinking I was a genius, was I created yearly local folders.
> TB: Local Folder > New Folder > {2016,2017,2018,etc}

There starts your filtering to group messages by date range.

> Then I sorted the Thunderbird Gmail Inbox by date & I shift-selected
> every Inbox email that came in during any given year, say for 2017.
>
> TB: (Selected Set) > Rightclick Move to > Local Folders > 2017
> where it says "Moving x of 6347 messages to 2017 and takes a while.
>
> But then the mail is still in the inbox.
> What did I do wrong?

You made local copies. You did not delete the copies shown in the Inbox
folder that are kept in sync with the server's Inbox folder in your
Gmail account. After moving the messages (they did show up in your 2017
folder, right?), delete those same messages if still in Inbox.

Anything in your Trash folder still consumes quota at the server, so
delete the deleted items from your Trash folder, or use Shift+Delete to
delete items in a folder without instead moving them to the Trash
folder. Items in Trash still exist, so they still consume storage
quota. Gmail will delete items of 30 days old from the Trash folder,
but until then those Trash items still consume server storage quota.

Gmail's All Mail folder holds (shows) every e-mail you have in any
folder. Gmail works on tags, not folders. Google doesn't supply a true
IMAP account. They emulate their webmail setup to behave mostly like an
IMAP account to local clients. They pretend their tags are folders to a
local e-mail client. Alas, you can have multiple tags assigned to an
e-mail item which can confuse local e-mail clients as to which folder an
item belongs. In IMAP, you can have multiple copies of an e-mail, but
in different folders. With Gmail, it has only 1 copy of an e-mail, and
changes the tag on it depending under which pseudo-folder(s) you want it
assigned.

Items you delete get moved into the Trash folder where they won't get
purged until after 30 days, or until you delete them from the Trash
folder. Anything still in Trash counts against your quota, and even up
to 24 to 48 hours after you delete from Trash, so bulk deletes in Trash
may not immediately show a reduction on quota consumption.

The All Mail folder is an archive folder showing all items regardless of
which pseudo-folder (tag) they've been assigned. If you delete from the
Inbox, Spam, or other folders, that is a move (re-tag) operation that
has them show up in the Trash folder. If you use Shift+Del, the item
should get permanently deleted (not moved to Trash folder). If you
delete from the Trash folder, the item(s) are also permanently deleted.
Items in the Trash folder still count against your online storage quota.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9312312?hl=en

Items in the Inbox and other folders have a tag on them by the
psuedo-folder name. Regardless of which tag is assigned to an item, or
even when no tag is assigned, All Mail shows all e-mails in your
account. After deleting from Trash, or using Shift+Del to permanently
delete items selected in other folders, I'd check if they are gone from
the All Mails folder, too.

> I get it's IMAP.
> But doesn't the move take care of that?

You are copying, not moving. After your "move", are the items listed in
both the 2017 and Inbox folders? IMAP is synchronizing the Inbox folder
to your online folder. Local folders in Tbird aren't sync'ing anywhere.
You are not moving items from the server's Inbox folder to somewhere
local. You are copying items from an IMAP folder to a local folder.
Just check after the "move" if the items are still in both folders.
After the "move" (copy), and after checking they really did get to the
local folder, delete them from Inbox.

You sure you really want to keep every e-mail you've ever received even
in the local folder? Seems like you would retaining a lot of garbage.
You're "moving" some good stuff with a lot of garbage into a local
archive folder.

Unless you are using Gmail for business, and where the business is
required to retain communications for some minimal time period (mortgage
companies have to keep them for 40 years), there is unlikely any e-mails
you still need that are over 5 years old. If those old e-mails had
attachments of, say, vacation photos, you should've have extracted those
attachments long ago to store separately wherever you keep your photo
files. E-mail clients make poor archival tools, especially since their
message store can get corrupted, and you lose some or all of your
e-mails.

Decide how long is the longest you need to keep e-mails. 2017 was over
5 years ago. Anything there is likely way too old to have value
anymore. You really need to keep an e-mail about some Black Friday sale
sent to you over 5 years ago? Search on e-mails over 5 years, extract
attachments that you want to keep (if you already didn't do that before
when you received the e-mails with attachments), delete those ancient
items, empty them from the Trash folder, too, and compact the message
store in Tbird.

Before you do all that, and because compaction could end up with a
corrupted message store, save image backups before making major changes
to the message store in Tbird. Give yourself a bridge letting you
revert any changes.

sticks <wolverine01@charter.net> wrote:

> On 2/19/2024 9:27 PM, Nick Cine wrote:
>> On Tue, 20 Feb 2024 03:22:52 +0100, Frank Miller wrote:
>>
>>> Let me get this straight. You reached the maximum capacity of your Google
>>> IMAP account, 15GB right?
>>> But you don't want to "go through thousands of emails to delete those no
>>> longer needed"? So you just try to download those emails?
>>
>> There are two kinds of people.
>>
>> The first kind knows they'll NEVER need an email from 2017 to 2020 (or so).
>> The other kind has no idea if they'll ever need to look up an email in that
>> time range.
>>
>> You're of the former.
>> I'm of the latter.
>
> I would have to agree with finding it hard to question someone who has a
> large amount of email saved. I still have ALL the email from when I
> retired over a decade ago, as well as thousands of work pictures and
> files. On several occasions I have been called by my former employee to
> help settle disputes with various subcontractors, even ending up in
> court. In fact, on one case I went to court over 50 times on a case
> that went all the way to our states Supreme Court on appeal. We won
> every time, and might not have if I wasn't such a stickler for keeping
> all that stuff.

ALL e-mails? Or just those you decided to keep at the time, or soon
thereafter? You keep e-mails sent to you with 2FA codes to complete a
login, and Black Fridays deals over 5 years ago, and dentist appointment
reminders, and party invites years ago, and so on? Probably not.
You're retaining your old /valuable/ e-mails, not all of them you ever
received.

Business and personal accounts should have different retention periods.
Businesses may need to keep business records for 7 years, or more.
Mortgage companies have to keep them for 40 years. But that doesn't
mean they keep every e-mail they ever received, just the ones that are
related to their business operations. You should never be melding your
business and personal-use e-mail account to conflate unrelated e-mails.

Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

> On 2/19/2024 9:22 PM, Frank Miller wrote:
>> Nick Cine wrote:
>>> I use Thunderbird on Windows 10 and Google GMail which is full.
>>>
>>> I want to do the least amount of thinking possible so I do not
>>> want to go through thousands of emails to delete those no longer
>>> needed - but I need to clear out the IMAP folders on Google servers.
>>> Without deleting.
>>>
>>> What I did, thinking I was a genius, was I created yearly local folders.
>>> TB: Local Folder > New Folder > {2016,2017,2018,etc}
>>>
>>> Then I sorted the Thunderbird Gmail Inbox by date & I shift-selected
>>> every Inbox email that came in during any given year, say for 2017.
>> [..snip..]
>>
>> Let me get this straight. You reached the maximum capacity of your Google
>> IMAP account, 15GB right?
>> But you don't want to "go through thousands of emails to delete those no
>> longer needed"? So you just try to download those emails? These emails
>> "no longer needed" - what for?
>> Of course you can build up a pile of trash in your home. Physically and
>> virtual; some call it "messie".
>>
>
> If this is the case [15GB of email], Google Takeout may offer a way to transfer the
> content to the home computer. And then set about deleting the materials
> from the server. Due to the potential size of the content, this may end up
> shipped as more than one ZIP file. Text email should compress well, but
> content which is mostly attachments, could be a lot less compressible for
> shipment.
>
> [ The "limit" and the "consequences" ]
> https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9312312?hl=en
>
> "How to download your Google data"
> https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en#zippy=%2Chow-do-i-locate-my-exported-takeout-data
>
> https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
>
> "Google Takeout provides email in the . MBOX format"
>
> By allows a problem to fester for this long, this is
> "borderline data recovery", due to bumping your head
> on limitations caused by being so close to the 15GB limitation.
>
> That's why I would suggest a "precautionary" Takeout operation
> so all the information is stored at home, and you have a copy
> of everything... before you "try and try to clean up". I don't
> view this as necessarily all that easy, because, after all, this
> is Google ("home of no customer support and fuck-you attitude").
>
> Paul

The description of Google Takeout is to backup your online data, not to
clean out the old crap. After backing up the stuff, you still have to
go around all the services for your Google account cleaning out the old
crap. I tried it, had them send my an e-mail when done, but they note
the export can take hours or days to complete. Yikes, no way to test
immediately if it is a solution, but I doubt it. It's for exporting
your data, not for deleting it (to increase your storage quota).

"Google Takeout allows you to download a copy of your data stored within
Google products."

So, you're still stuck doing the cleanup to regain storage quota.

Note: While I was writing this post, Google sent the e-mail with a link
to download the exported data. Took only a couple minutes to get the
e-mail, but then I have little stored in my Google account. No photos,
no files in Drive, and no e-mails (it's a secondary account rarely
used). In the e-mail, I clicked on the "Download your files" link. My
login password was required to prove it was me accessing my data (but
not a full login as I didn't have to reenter my username/email address).
The web page showed the download would be 15.3 MB in size, so small as
expected since I use little of their services. The download file is
delivered as a .zip file. After downloading, and using Peazip to
extract to a new folder, what's inside are .csv, .html, .ics, .vcf,
..json (which are just text files similar to XML), .mbox (e-mail), and
other common filetypes. Most of the files are empty, because I don't
have that data type stored in my Google account.

Don't know why Cine thinks Takeout is useless. It collected my Google
data, put in a .zip file which downloaded okay, and has lots on empty
and non-empty files inside. They're obviously empty when there is no
online data to collect for a data type, but they do exist to show that
data type got collected. All files could be opened, and were readable.
Cine did something wrong when using Takeout.

On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 22:04:56 -0600, VanguardLH wrote:

> Don't know why Cine thinks Takeout is useless. It collected my Google
> data, put in a .zip file which downloaded okay

Try to read your email that was inside the Google Takeout zip file.
It's indecipherable.

Nick Cine wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Feb 2024 03:22:52 +0100, Frank Miller wrote:
>
>> Let me get this straight. You reached the maximum capacity of your Google
>> IMAP account, 15GB right?
>> But you don't want to "go through thousands of emails to delete those no
>> longer needed"? So you just try to download those emails?
>
> There are two kinds of people.
>
> The first kind knows they'll NEVER need an email from 2017 to 2020 (or so).
> The other kind has no idea if they'll ever need to look up an email in that
> time range.
>
> You're of the former.
> I'm of the latter.

Nope. I'm the third kind you didn't mention.

My mails are sorted by my mail provider into different IMAP folders from
filters i set. Like Work, mailing lists, personal, trading, consuming, news, etc.

I receive, read and answer those mails with Thunderbird. In general i keep
these mails for about eight weeks in my online IMAP folders.
(Some of my folders in Thunderbird are also set to automatically clean up
older mails like mailing lists - on and offline.)

Then i decide which mails i really want or should archive and keep, and
download them to dedicated local folders. This archive of my local folders
reaches down to 2009 and older.

I never had an unsorted inbox like you, where the capacity exceeded 15 fucking
gigabytes. You just messed up your Google mail account and now you're
complaining about downloading it.

On 2/19/2024 11:51 PM, Nick Cine wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 22:04:56 -0600, VanguardLH wrote:
>
>> Don't know why Cine thinks Takeout is useless. It collected my Google
>> data, put in a .zip file which downloaded okay
>
> Try to read your email that was inside the Google Takeout zip file.
> It's indecipherable.
>

Your header says you're on MacOS at the moment.

Please use a platform with some forensic tools before
telling us what's wrong. On my Mac G4, I had *plenty*
of forensic tools, because, I had more than one OS and
framework loaded. Back in those days, half my power
user activity was in Terminal. I even had a nice hex editor
back then (ran in Classic, as the OS loaded on my Mac
was the dual MacOSX/Classic setup, which is why I bought
the machine. VMs ran in Conectix VirtualPC.).

To start with, the export outer container is
either ZIP or .tar.gz .

From a Linux prompt:

file takeout.zip

or

file takeout.tar.gz

Even when a file extension is used on a file, the file
itself does not have to match the extension. The Linux "file"
command has the /etc/magic file, which contains minimally
identifiable strings which can be used to sort out all possible
file formats from one another.

The Linux file manager also sniffs that way, and does not depend
on extension as Windows does.

Now, use your available tools to unpack the file.

Did you get the MBOX file ? That's a text file

file all.mbox

Check whether it claims to be some form of text. The Linux
sniffer can distinguish *100* different variants of text.
I didn't know this, until one day I scanned a Firefox tarball,
and just about all possible text formats were being used in
the tarball :-(

Windows has 7ZIP and it has its own FM (file manager).
You can right-click a file, ask 7ZIP to open as archive, and
it does a better job than the Linux Archive Manager. It can
drill into files too, and to multiple levels of nesting.

An MBOX should open in a text editor

textedit all.mbox
notepad all.mbox
xed all.mbox

A lot of the text editors, recognize the two metadata bytes
at the beginning of the file, indicating something other than
ASCII encoding. Make sure the tool you're opening the MBOX with,
is not too old for this sort of work.

Of course, actual email tools can handle the storage variants
for the MBOX. My copy of Claris Emailer could not, but that's
ancient software. Just about anything which is still in support,
can access the MBOX.

In Windows, the HxD editor can open arbitrary files, so you can
have a look at the first 1K of data, to ascertain what the file is.

https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

The file is unlikely to be encrypted. It was likely downloaded
under an SSL/TLS linkage, to prevent third party transit sniffing.
And the assumption is, you've sent the information to the
correct individual.

I think I've already opened my Takeout, I just don't remember
what I did with the test sample. OK, it was downloaded on the other machine,
and sent over here.

takeout-20230224T082142Z-001.zip 02-24-2023 (almost a year ago) 20,299,203

S:\takeout-20230224T082142Z-001.zip\Takeout\Mail\

"All mail Including Spam and Trash.mbox" size 42,605,917 PackedSize 20,244,042

Opened the file in Notepad. This is the first three lines. Notice that GMail
has the capability to assign a category of "Promotion" to the Spam I received.
While the file is the "All" box, notice you receive sufficient metadata
to identify what actual box it is in, which is Inbox here. If I had six boxes,
then the six box enumerations would mark what box the item really belonged in.

From 1756573411535516758@xxx Tue Jan 31 21:02:27 +0000 2023
X-GM-THRID: 1756573411535516758
X-Gmail-Labels: Inbox,Category Promotions,Unread

Further down, after the mondo-gmail header...

Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2023 16:02:10 -0500
From: "<name of ISP>" <donotreply@NameOfISP.com>
....
Subject: We want to hear from you!

Yes, I love surveys, which is why that message is unread.

*******

OK, now let's do the important part.

Ask Linux what that MBOX file is.

I'll use Win11, WSL and Ubuntu for that.

me@WALLACE:/mnt/d/Takeout/Mail$ file *
All mail Including Spam and Trash.mbox: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators

It's not even a tricky format. Which is strange. This implies it's
a 7 bit clean storage. No character higher than 0x7F, no 0x80 to be expected.

Now, let's use HxD hex editor on it, do a copy (editor-view-copy), which
includes the HxD decorations. Truncated to just after the Gmail labels.
Notice there are no 0xFF 0xFE bytes at the beginning, indicating a
non-ASCII file.

Offset(d) 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15

00000000 46 72 6F 6D 20 31 37 35 36 35 37 33 34 31 31 35 From 17565734115
00000016 33 35 35 31 36 37 35 38 40 78 78 78 20 54 75 65 35516758@xxx Tue
00000032 20 4A 61 6E 20 33 31 20 32 31 3A 30 32 3A 32 37 Jan 31 21:02:27
00000048 20 2B 30 30 30 30 20 32 30 32 33 0D 0A 58 2D 47 +0000 2023..X-G
00000064 4D 2D 54 48 52 49 44 3A 20 31 37 35 36 35 37 33 M-THRID: 1756573
00000080 34 31 31 35 33 35 35 31 36 37 35 38 0D 0A 58 2D 411535516758..X-
00000096 47 6D 61 69 6C 2D 4C 61 62 65 6C 73 3A 20 49 6E Gmail-Labels: In
00000112 62 6F 78 2C 43 61 74 65 67 6F 72 79 20 50 72 6F box,Category Pro
00000128 6D 6F 74 69 6F 6E 73 2C 55 6E 72 65 61 64 0D 0A motions,Unread..

You can see it has Windows line endings (Dog Able), but most computers
these days, do not pass out from the effort of dealing
with line endings.

"It's indecipherable." OK, then.

There is *plenty* of stuff I cannot unpack :-) This isn't one of them.
I'm no good at crypto, no good at all.

If we look at the file as downloaded, this is the first line.
The magic string "PK" is the ZIP declaration.

Offset(h) 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F

00000000 50 4B 03 04 14 00 08 08 08 00 DD 02 58 56 00 00 PK........Ý.XV..

/usr/lib/file/magic <=== Where Linux currently stores /etc/magic
The string which is printed here, can be seen inside the magic file.

me@WALLACE:/mnt/d$ file takeout-20230224T082142Z-001.zip
takeout-20230224T082142Z-001.zip: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract

Which means just about any commodity computer should be able
to handle that. This is why they use ZIP for Takeout, on the expectation
it won't be a puzzle.

Paul

On 20.02.24 06:14, Frank Miller wrote:
> Nick Cine wrote:
>> On Tue, 20 Feb 2024 03:22:52 +0100, Frank Miller wrote:
>>
>>> Let me get this straight. You reached the maximum capacity of your Google
>>> IMAP account, 15GB right?
>>> But you don't want to "go through thousands of emails to delete those no
>>> longer needed"? So you just try to download those emails?
>>
>> There are two kinds of people.
>>
>> The first kind knows they'll NEVER need an email from 2017 to 2020 (or so).
>> The other kind has no idea if they'll ever need to look up an email in that
>> time range.
>>
>> You're of the former.
>> I'm of the latter.
>
> Nope. I'm the third kind you didn't mention.
>
> My mails are sorted by my mail provider into different IMAP folders from
> filters i set. Like Work, mailing lists, personal, trading, consuming, news, etc.
>
> I receive, read and answer those mails with Thunderbird. In general i keep
> these mails for about eight weeks in my online IMAP folders.
> (Some of my folders in Thunderbird are also set to automatically clean up
> older mails like mailing lists - on and offline.)
>
> Then i decide which mails i really want or should archive and keep, and
> download them to dedicated local folders. This archive of my local folders
> reaches down to 2009 and older.
>
> I never had an unsorted inbox like you, where the capacity exceeded 15 fucking
> gigabytes. You just messed up your Google mail account and now you're
> complaining about downloading it.

I tend to agree and I archive my mails similarly in dedicated folders
each year in local folders in my TB on my lead-system. I view my
archives as databases. My TB finds them very quickly if needed.
My Time Machine (macOS) takes care of the backups.

--
"Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant!"

On 2/19/2024 10:44 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
> NOTE: Not a Windows 10 issue, so I removed that newsgroup in my reply.
>
> Nick Cine <nickcine@is.invalid> wrote:
>
>> I use Thunderbird on Windows 10 and Google GMail which is full.
>
> Wow, you consumed all 15GB of your Google account's storage quota just
> with e-mails? You really need to clean out the garbage.

Do the math.

15,000,000,000 divided by 6347 messages.

The attachments then, cause each message to average 2,363,321 bytes.

This means, when working at the message-listing level, things
are still do-able. But in terms of the "plumbing" when working
at the MBOX level or when working out how long it will take to
download, that might be a bit unwieldy.

It would have been much worse, if 15GB limit was hit, and
the messages didn't have attachments. As then there could be
millions of messages.

When Thunderbird goes to "eat" a box like that, the fur is
going to fly. You would want a clean environment, you'd
want a big machine (lots of RAM), and x64 versions of OS
and application software (Thunderbird). And then hope that
the box is not too big for some aspect of Thunderbird.

Since the label metadata in the header, allows sorting the 6347
messages into boxes, that might have helped in some cases. But
I suspect the Inbox in this case, has all 6347 in it.

A person could write a Gawk script, and sort the box into archive
folders based on the Date field and verifying the Label field,
and so on. I'd just chop it up manually with a little script.
Then place the appropriately named boxes into a Thunderbird
profile folder (that clean machine, so you don't blow up
any other materials while doing this). Thunderbird can
open the 2017.MBOX if it wants, and work on that, and leave the
2018.MBOX until the 2017 one is processed. This may reduce the
peak RAM requirement during consumption.

*******

Parsing the limits article is a perilous thing.
While nothing hints at a brick wall here, I wouldn't
be surprised to find such a brick wall.

https://kb.mozillazine.org/Limits_-_Thunderbird

Paul

In article <ur0dje$bknl$1@solani.org>, Nick Cine wrote...
>
> I use Thunderbird on Windows 10 and Google GMail which is full.
>
> I want to do the least amount of thinking possible so I do not
> want to go through thousands of emails to delete those no longer
> needed - but I need to clear out the IMAP folders on Google servers.
> Without deleting.
>

If you're married to "Without deleting" you have some headaches ahead. But
I've found that if you sort your inbox by Sender (just click the header), it's
astonishing how quickly you can discard scores at a time. You also don't have
that constant mental "context change" every time you move to the next email.
Try it! It's deeply satisfying!

--

Phil, London

Philip Herlihy wrote:
> In article <ur0dje$bknl$1@solani.org>, Nick Cine wrote...
>>
>> I use Thunderbird on Windows 10 and Google GMail which is full.
>>
>> I want to do the least amount of thinking possible so I do not
>> want to go through thousands of emails to delete those no longer
>> needed - but I need to clear out the IMAP folders on Google servers.
>> Without deleting.
>>
>
> If you're married to "Without deleting" you have some headaches ahead. But
> I've found that if you sort your inbox by Sender (just click the header), it's
> astonishing how quickly you can discard scores at a time. You also don't have
> that constant mental "context change" every time you move to the next email.
> Try it! It's deeply satisfying!
>

The mistake is to use IMAP.

If you use POP with the default configuration everything is removed from
the server as soon as it has been transferred to your PC. So no more
problems with "Mailbox Full" messages. Yes, this is even a problem for
those who have 50GByte mailboxes!

In your mail client you can automatically archive old stuff from your
Inbox to a "not_wanted_anymore" folder where you can keep it - if you
must - until your PC fills up.

--
Graham J

On 20.02.24 12:01, Graham J wrote:
> Philip Herlihy wrote:
>> In article <ur0dje$bknl$1@solani.org>, Nick Cine wrote...
>>>
>>> I use Thunderbird on Windows 10 and Google GMail which is full.
>>>
>>> I want to do the least amount of thinking possible so I do not
>>> want to go through thousands of emails to delete those no longer
>>> needed - but I need to clear out the IMAP folders on Google servers.
>>> Without deleting.
>>>
>>
>> If you're married to "Without deleting" you have some headaches ahead. But
>> I've found that if you sort your inbox by Sender (just click the header), it's
>> astonishing how quickly you can discard scores at a time. You also don't have
>> that constant mental "context change" every time you move to the next email.
>> Try it! It's deeply satisfying!
>>
>
> The mistake is to use IMAP.

The mistake is not to unserstand the possibilities and the scope of
IMAP. IMAP can do *everything* POP can.

And filters help a lot:

"If Message is older than 1 day move/copy to local folder"

--
"Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant!"

Jörg Lorenz wrote:

[snip]
>> The mistake is to use IMAP.
>
> The mistake is not to understand the possibilities and the scope of
> IMAP. IMAP can do *everything* POP can.
>
> And filters help a lot:
>
> "If Message is older than 1 day move/copy to local folder"
>

But using POP avoids the need to understand. Most computer users I've
seen don't have the capability to understand.

--
Graham J

On 2024-02-20 05:04, VanguardLH wrote:
> sticks <wolverine01@charter.net> wrote:
>
>> On 2/19/2024 9:27 PM, Nick Cine wrote:
>>> On Tue, 20 Feb 2024 03:22:52 +0100, Frank Miller wrote:
>>>
>>>> Let me get this straight. You reached the maximum capacity of your Google
>>>> IMAP account, 15GB right?
>>>> But you don't want to "go through thousands of emails to delete those no
>>>> longer needed"? So you just try to download those emails?
>>>
>>> There are two kinds of people.
>>>
>>> The first kind knows they'll NEVER need an email from 2017 to 2020 (or so).
>>> The other kind has no idea if they'll ever need to look up an email in that
>>> time range.
>>>
>>> You're of the former.
>>> I'm of the latter.
>>
>> I would have to agree with finding it hard to question someone who has a
>> large amount of email saved. I still have ALL the email from when I
>> retired over a decade ago, as well as thousands of work pictures and
>> files. On several occasions I have been called by my former employee to
>> help settle disputes with various subcontractors, even ending up in
>> court. In fact, on one case I went to court over 50 times on a case
>> that went all the way to our states Supreme Court on appeal. We won
>> every time, and might not have if I wasn't such a stickler for keeping
>> all that stuff.
>
> ALL e-mails? Or just those you decided to keep at the time, or soon
> thereafter? You keep e-mails sent to you with 2FA codes to complete a
> login, and Black Fridays deals over 5 years ago, and dentist appointment
> reminders, and party invites years ago, and so on? Probably not.
> You're retaining your old /valuable/ e-mails, not all of them you ever
> received.

No.

I keep them all.

Purging important from non important emails takes important time, so I
don't do it. Keeping them all is cheap.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 2024-02-20 14:00, Graham J wrote:
> Jörg Lorenz wrote:
>
> [snip]
>>> The mistake is to use IMAP.
>>
>> The mistake is not to understand the possibilities and the scope of
>> IMAP. IMAP can do *everything* POP can.
>>
>> And filters help a lot:
>>
>> "If Message is older than 1 day move/copy to local folder"
>>
>
> But using POP avoids the need to understand.  Most computer users I've
> seen don't have the capability to understand.

Using POP on gmail doesn't actually move mail. Old mail stays on the
server. It is a gmail feature.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 2024-02-19 21:27, Nick Cine wrote:
> I use Thunderbird on Windows 10 and Google GMail which is full.
>
> I want to do the least amount of thinking possible so I do not
> want to go through thousands of emails to delete those no longer
> needed - but I need to clear out the IMAP folders on Google servers.
> Without deleting.
>
> What I did, thinking I was a genius, was I created yearly local folders.
> TB: Local Folder > New Folder > {2016,2017,2018,etc}
>
> Then I sorted the Thunderbird Gmail Inbox by date & I shift-selected
> every Inbox email that came in during any given year, say for 2017.
>
> TB: (Selected Set) > Rightclick Move to > Local Folders > 2017
> where it says "Moving x of 6347 messages to 2017 and takes a while.
>
> But then the mail is still in the inbox.
> What did I do wrong?
>
> I get it's IMAP.
> But doesn't the move take care of that?
>
> Or do I have to then DELETE the mail in the inbox that I moved.
> I am asking before I do it just to make sure it's the right thing to do.
>
> Or is there an easier way to move Thunderbird emails, to yearly
> folders that are stored only on the Windows PC file system?

The problem is that gmail interpretation of IMAP is not standard. They
do things their own ways. The default in gmail is to keep everything,
delete nothing. It may depend on some option you chose somewhere, I'm
not sure.

Thus you might have to do a second operation to actually delete.

You could try the Message menu, move to...

I did a similar operation to yours for somebody with a gmail full
account. In this case, the problem were photos sent by email, so what I
did was create another gmail account, then use Thunderbird to move mails
older that some age and bigger that 1 MB to the other account. It worked.

I think I used a find folder, but I don't remember for sure.

--
Cheers, Carlos.