Import mail from ZD

[driecken]

I moved from Mozilla Thunderbird to Zimbra Desktop client a few months back, and subsequently transferred locally stored mail into Zimbra without too much of an issue.

I would like to file my mail into thunderbird again and sync it with imap on gmail, as a redundancy backup, seeing as I use pop3 for ZD, my mail is only kept locally after retreival from serv, however the export feature on ZD spits out a zip with tar.gz files, which I am somewhat unfamiliar with in regards to being able to move them into a useable format for mozilla thunderbird.

Is there an alternative feature for localized mail storage in regards to file formats and export selections on ZD, if not how else can I transfer these locally stored ZD mail messages into thunderbird, is there a tool//utility to convert them in some way, or am I stuck with a proprietary format on all of my ZD stored mail messages?

Thanks in advance.

[kevindods]

Interesting question, I haven't come at ZD email from that direction before.

As a side note, the Zimbra email storage is not proprietary as the system is OSS, and most of the information is stored within the filesystem as discreet files and DBs to handle the indexing and sync status.

As to the export/backup of data you can use the import/export options under preferences and take a backup. If you choose only to export the mail messages without meta data they are placed in a zip or tar.gz file containing directories with individual EML files which should be 'importable' if there is such a word!

My supplementary question to you would be why use POP3? Is it a limitation with the mail service ie you are not Zimbra or an IMAP capable service?

Might be a case to change the mail service to something like an IMAP one that allows you to shift the email content to various other clients via the server end instead of client?

[driecken]

Thanks for the response, I ended up going with a quicker solution than waiting for a response.

Created a new account and associated it with one of my gmail's on IMAP, imported the folders/mail etc. from my primary account and sync grabbed everything to gmail, and everything is backed up on that account now.