back up your OE files first and put them on an external hard drive.

[link]

you might need to do OE --> Outlook before you can import your email files.

Oh, my files are already backed up. For Outlook, actually, I would have to import to Windows Live Mail and then export to Outlook, but I may just use Outlook to keep my personal work e-mails. I think that was the issue I was having, actually, when I thought maybe I couldn't get Outlook. But I think I will have it.

I think also maybe that Thunderbird can't easily take my .dbx files, and I was considering using that program. But Windows Live Mail appears to be able to import my mail directly, so I can't remember what I was so worried about. I just hope it works correctly.

I had this problem, and apparently it's because I had bought stuff with two different IDs (although I'm not sure how), and I could never fix it, although I didn't go so far as to contact Apple about it. I think megan walker had a similar issue.

I only have the one ID. If it would just tell me which apps I'll lose, I could make a more informed decision.

I've been using Thunderbird as my backup, but with any setting I can find it has one flaw - it is find as a picture of Gmail's current state, but useless for archiving. If I delete something in gmail, thunderbird deletes it on the local client.

So I decided to give Gmail Backup a try. Only, it turns out Gmail backup backs up each email as a seperate file. I have 2 Gigabytes of gmail data. Understandably by the time all that was downloaded as separate files it slowed down by computer something awful. I uninstalled gmail backup and delete those files and deleted the restore point that help a copy of those 100,000 files or whatever in a single directory.

So I guess the next step is to backup thunderbird by copying to mbox file as a form of archiving, then start purging the absurd number of emails I have on gmail.

Huh. That's weird. Is that a Gmail thing? Because I have a Yahoo email address and use Thunderbird and it doesn't delete items in the inbox once I've deleted them from the server...

Maybe I just have a setting wrong on Thunderbird.

OK. I have an IMAP connection, not a pop connection. I already used 2 gig of my 250 gig download with Gmail backup, so I won't mess with it at the moment. But next month I'll change to Pop, and see if I can keep it from deleting when downloading.

I'm certain it is possible to change to POP without redownloading everything, but in case I mess something up, and need to redownload, I'll wait.

TB,

did you see this link?

[link]

Yeah. That what I thought I had done. I looked at every setting except that it never occurred to me that I had enabled imap instead of POP. It is easy enough to enable pop, and then maybe the other setting will keep it from deleting on the client when stuff is deleted on the server. The reason I'm waiting until next month, is that I'm afraid that when I switch from IMAP to POP, it may download everything. I hope not, but just in case I'll wait until November so I don't use up too much of my Comcast bandwith. It depends on whether with a new connection Thunderbird will be smart enough to notice that I already have all existing emails.

I figured out how do it without accidentally redownloading. I disable Imap, enabled pop, but only from now forward. I could not figure out how to change a thunderbird imap folder to a pop folder, so I created a new account in thunderbird for the pop access. So from now on, all new email downloaded will be in the new folder, while history from a few minutes ago backward will be in the old folder. And I tested it, and with pop access deleting it from the server does not delete from the client -at least not after I tweaked a few setting.