How to archive messages out of the Mozilla mail client


The easiest way to archive email messages out of the Mozilla mail client is to save them to a local folder (which is really just a big text file), which can then be compressed to .zip format to save space, or moved to cd-rom or other archival media and removed from the network.

To do this:

- Right click on Local Folders and create a New folder to hold the messages that you want to remove from the server.



- Open the folder on the server that contains the messages that you want to move. Highlight the messages that you want to remove, then right click and choose Copy-To.




- Choose the local folder that you just created.

- After the messages have finished copying (it could take a little while depending on how many messages are being moved at once), close Mozilla completely (both browser and email client).


Using the Windows File Manager, open your Mozilla profile folder (located in h:\local\mozilla) and locate the Mail folder. Double click on it to open it, then open the Local Folders folder.

You'll find two files here for the folder that you just created - one has no file extension, the other has a .msf extension.  The file with no extension is the important one - it contains all of your messages. Note the difference in file sizes in the example below:


Move or copy the files out of the Local Folders directory to your archive medium of choice (.zip file, cd-rom, usb drive, etc...), then delete both files from the Local Folders directory to free up the space.

One example of archiving

I created a directory called "archives" in my Mozilla profile directory, then move the messages from the Local Folders directory to the archives directory. Once there, I compress both files into a .ZIP using PowerArchiver and delete the originals. This compresses the space that the archived folders occupy by about 90%.

1 - From the Windows File Explorer, locate the folder files that you want to archive, highlight them by shift-clicking or ctrl-clicking, then go to the Edit menu and choose "Cut". You could choose "Copy" if you're squeamish about using Cut, but you'll have to come back and manually delete the files after you get done to free up the space.





The archived folder file (the one with no extension) is in plain text format, so it can be searched by the Windows search feature, opened by any wordprocessor program, notepad, or pulled back into a Mozilla folder again.

To pull the file back into Mozilla again, close Mozilla and the Mozilla email client completely.  Copy the archived folder file(s) off of cd to the Mail\Local Folders directory in your Mozilla profile. Start the Mozilla mail client.

The archived folder(s) will appear automatically in the Local Folders list. If the .MSF file wasn't backed up (and therefore restored) with the original folder file, a new .msf will be created when you open the folder.

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