I was in a bit of a bind the other day when I learned that an IMAP server I was using was going to dissapear. I wanted to backup all of my mail, but had too many messages hosted on the IMAP server to copy from one to another, so I decided I’d download them all locally first and then deal with them later. I used fetchmail to download all of my messages from the IMAP main folder to my local spool, and copied over all of the sub folders because I was in a rush and needed to copy them quickly.
Once they were in my local mail spool, I wanted to get them into Thunderbird, but learned that the option I had once used to read my localmail had gone. There used to be an option for it in the GUI, but somewhere along the line it got removed. After a bit of Googling, I found: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2003-December/027652.html
This worked for me, and should work for any one that wants to use Thunderbird to read local mail.
Basically, you add a new mail account in Thunderbird as usual, then close it. Get into your local profile directory by using
cd .thunderbird/[tab]find your new mail server, with the bogus name and change the hostname to localhost, change your name to
then
vi prefs.js
user_pref(”mail.server.server4.hostname”, “localhost”);Once thats done, you can restart Thunderbird and fetch your mail as usual. From there you can do as you wish with your messages.
user_pref(”mail.server.server4.name”, “owen@localhost”);
user_pref(”mail.server.server4.type”, “movemail”);
user_pref(”mail.server.server4.userName”, “owen”);
Excellent! My question really is why was the GUI option removed from Thunderbird? Whatever the answer this method still works, so if you need to, use it while you still can!
source: http://www.thelinuxblog.com/thunderbird-localmail-spool/