Thunderbird - Migration of archives to a new IMAP instance

[mcr1980m]

Hello,

I have been using Thunderbird for years to support POP3 mail and have a large archive.

I would like to upgrade (or rather recreate) my account as an IMAP account since my provider supports this protocol and it has obvious benefits.

I do not want to lose the massive archive of emails I have and I want to be able to go back into the archives easily and at any time.

Is there a clever way to perform this upgrade / migration?

I think that I could trash my profile as it stands and recreate as an IMAP account but I would then presumably lose my archive ... or would I

Confused,

UK.

 

[Big Dan]

I'd make a secondary account the IMAP account and connect to it with Thunderbird. From there drag and drop a couple of messages into the IMAP folder and see if the copy over. I suspect they will but never really tried. If it works and you can see the messages on the IMAP server. Cancel the POP account and create a new one with IMAP. Drag and drop everything over into the new IMAP account.

Depending on how large your archive is it may take you a few days/weeks to copy everything over as it's governed by your upload speed.

Just to be safe back up your entire Thunderbird profile before you do anything.