I’ve blithely assumed that backups / snapshots of my home dir (including my Thunderbird profile) were covering my email. But it occurs to me it may be more difficult than expected.

I have message synchronization on for any folders I care about (“for offline use”). What I was assuming this meant was that if my mail host disappeared or mysteriously deleted an important folder, I would still be able to switch to a backup, start TB in offline mode (via a commandline parameter), and copy those folders to a local folder at which point I could reconnect and drag them back to my new host, a local imapd I use as an archive, or wherever.

But …would that actually work? Anyone recover email from offline folders? How’d that go?

Edit:

Well, there can never be too many reminders to verify our backups and I’m all for that but that’s less what I was after. I was specifically thinking about the scenario when an IMAP host somehow loses an important folder or disappears entirely. How would it go to recover from a sync’d folder in tb? What caveats would there be? Would attachments show up?

But ya, this post was silly, it’s easy enough to try. Yes it works, yes the attachments come with. No major issues in my limited test.

However, I did learn one annoying thing: there is no command line option to start Thunderbird in offline mode. So in the case where the folder was deleted on IMAP I’d either have to:

• disconnect from the network before running the app
• quickly toggle offline before it finishes connecting and deleting the folder
• use the pref to prompt if you want to go online every time you start

I think for as rare a scenario as this is it’s fine to just disconnect but I’m a bit surprised it really doesn’t seem to have a flag for it.