Tricks + things to know when copying/moving large number of mails in Thunderbird

= Storage format and location =

 1. At the time of this writing, mails are stored on a machine called ''lipari''
 2. The home directoy on this machine is private (not the one shared via nfs on most other machines)
 3. The format is mbox: one file per folder, each mail starting with "From " (without the quotes)
 4. The ''INBOX'' is called ''.mail'' and is stored in the home directory
 5. The imap folders are in a subdirectory called ''imap'' (this can be configured in Thunderbird)

= Tricks =

 1. For folders != INBOX and not currently used, you can just copy/move the respective files on lipari
 2. When moving folders, after the previous step: unsubscribe from the old folder and subscribe to the new one
 3. It's probably best to close Thunderbird while doing this, but I don't think it's necessary
 4. For bulk moves from ''INBOX (.mail)'', manually create a lock file ''.mail.lock'' in the director of the ''.mail'' file: during that time, no other process should be able to deliver mail (append) to the file