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