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Comment by HNAbusesUsers | Hacker News Reader

After getting my parents new computers, setting them up from scratch, and finding that Windows is an even more depressing shitshow than ever and lacking any competent E-mail program... I installed Thunderbird for the first time in at least a decade and a half.

And I was pleasantly surprised to find that it's better than I remember, and worked great for the 20,000 messages or so in each of their AOL In boxes. Sadly, I'm not kidding about those In boxes.

For my accounts I rely on Apple Mail and SpamSieve, which works well. The dealbreaker for me when I tried Thunderbird years ago is that it lacked any way to export the filters you'd set up, so you could copy them to your other computers. Has this been addressed?

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> The dealbreaker for me when I tried Thunderbird years ago is that it lacked any way to export the filters you'd set up, so you could copy them to your other computers. Has this been addressed?

It’s been a while since I used Thunderbird and looked at its internal files. But I remember some .dat file inside the profile that stored the filters and could be copied across.

Edit: Found it. The filter rules are in a file called msgFilterRules.dat. This answer and others on super user (from more than 10 years ago) have the details. [1] I’m sure the Thunderbird forums would also have this information.

[1]: http://superuser.com/questions/439451/ddg#439458

Only tangentially related but I wrote some code to manipulate these filters with the hope that I would help manage/centralize them more easily: https://remusao.github.io/posts/parsing-thunderbird-msg-filt...

Leaving it here in case that’s useful to anyone.

>For my accounts I rely on Apple Mail and SpamSieve, which works well. The dealbreaker for me when I tried Thunderbird years ago is that it lacked any way to export the filters you'd set up, so you could copy them to your other computers. Has this been addressed?

No. You can't even copy them to other accounts on the same computer. I had to recreate dozens of rules last year for just that reason. If TB wasn't head and shoulders above other MUAs, I'd have dumped it.

Then again, I have emails in TB accounts going back to 1996, so perhaps I'm biased in that regard.

Please see my other comment in this thread on how to copy filter rules from one profile to another. [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34735788

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