Question

I ran gmail backup, which marked all my gmail messages as read. Ugh. I actually use that read/unread information. I had just installed Thunderbird, and it shows hundreds of messages in "All Mail" that are unread. Only it had only downloaded the headers, not the messages. So something in Thunderbird knows they are unread, but I'm not sure exactly what.

I read that there are two files for any mail folder, an mbox-format file and a .msf file. The mbox format file for "All Mail" does not have all the messages. However, the .msf file is pretty big, and I wonder if it has all the read/unread info.

If it does, I would consider extracting it, and going back and reapplying it programmatically (say, using gmail4j).

No correct solution

OTHER TIPS

The msf file is using Mork format so reading it is pretty complicated. Fortunately, you don't have to: the mails in the mbox file have a special X-Mozilla-Status header. It's a hexadecimal value combining a number of flags. The lowest bit in this header (0x0001) is only set for messages that are read - if it isn't there then the message is unread.

If you want to read only Header and the Summary part of your Emails, then you can read it from your .msf file of your Mozilla Thunderbird, Since The .msf file is just a index file of Mozilla Thunderbird. So you cannot read all the information of your Emails from it. To read your Emails, you first need to find the location of your INBOX File which doesn't have an extension. you can find its location from here in your Thunderbird Email client:

C:\Users\admin\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\wb09b73f.default\ImapMail\imap.googlemail.com 

Then, copy it and paste it to other location of your system and rename it to INBOX.mbox and then you can easily import it from your Mozilla Thunderbird and can Easily read your Emails after importing it on your Thunderbird.

Licensed under: CC-BY-SA with attribution
Not affiliated with StackOverflow
scroll top