How to snyc up a local Thunderbird email client to the cloud on multiple computers in small amounts

Please understand that when you send an email in plain text it is shared with the whole world. It is a real bother to keep Internet access 24/7 everywhere you go on your computers so I use the local Thunderbird Mozilla client. This way, I can view multiple email accounts offline when I don't have Internet access. The beauty of this is when I'm traveling all I have to do is go to the local coffee shop or fast food restaurant and establish an Internet connection on my laptop and shazam, I have all my multiple email accounts up-to-date in one email client application.

However, there are drawbacks to this that we will discuss, such as all of your computers being out-of-sync every time you turn them on. In addition, Thunderbird also has local configuration files signatures and account information that you will find hard to keep synced across all of your computers. For years I have used WinMerge (http://winmerge.org) with a USB drive in an attempt to keep all of the local files that Thunderbird uses in sync which has been a pain in my a$$. I also copied my local Thunderbird email files to my USB backups which is also painful and time consuming. There was also a lot on manual configuration to be performed on each computer to keep them in sync.

It is for these reasons that most people just log into their online email and manage everything at google.com or outlook.com, or one account on their smartphone, which I think is a mistake. If you have that power outage or are traveling to places unknown, you are completely cut off from your email. She had maintained all of her email with our ISP and when we moved, the ISP closed that account. What she did not understand was that when the account closed, she would lose all her email, all of her contacts, etc. and begged me to get them back, but no can do, not without a local copy backed up to your home computer! We also had hurricane IRMA when we lost power for five days!

Therefore, I set out to solve the best of both worlds for us all, so I will never again have to hear my wife cry about her email and contacts being lost. I also don't want to waste my time for years to come, manually syncing configuration files on all my computers that are running the Thunderbird email client. The first problem I ran into was finding all the local Thunderbird files and then moving them to my sky drive. Directions on how to do this will be coming in my next blog entry, as I ran into a few problems syncing my first two computers.

NOTE:  You will have to assess whether or not your email files will fit into your sky drive by right-clicking on the directory and selecting Properties to see just how big your email files have become. It is surprising the amount of junk email we have hanging around.

In my case, everything fit so I moved it all thinking that I had a solution to the Thunderbird local email client, now sky drive problem. However, my computers began taking large amounts of time syncing up to my Google Sky Drive, as my local (now sky) files were gigabytes in size. Thunderbird constantly reshapes its local .msf storage files that house your email, thus causing constant syncing to take place as you read, delete and compact these files.

Also understand that Thunderbird is syncing with its configured email servers as local email accounts/files download and adjust to your ISP accounts. This causes a double sync in where your email client is syncing to your sky drive because your email client just synced which makes this solution sound impossible (round and round) unless you have an incredibly FAST Internet connection and in that thought you are correct, somewhat.

As a result before I can finish this project I had to go through about 7 years of email and delete and compact everything I could before making this all work. Once I got the Thunderbird .msf files down to a small size this worked beautifully! Please understand this process of deleting email, compacting files and then syncing them up again is painful but liberating (like starting a whole new life!). I had to relive deaths in the family, arguments, emails from my editor, bad news from my master tax preparer, and so much more. However, I kept at it and after each evening of work my sync time is got shorter and shorter with my Gigabyte Internet connection making this a very viable and awesome solution to a multiple email account local/sky/IMAP former problem.

WARNING:  Do not enter into this project unless you are willing to spend the time to delete a ton of old email.  If you do not, you will forever see your Thunderbird email and files continuously syncing up both to your email servers and to your cloud drive. If you don't clean house you will find yourself unable to even send an email while minutes or hours of syncing takes place.  In my case it took me weeks to delete all my old email and compact the Thunderbird folders to a suitable size but what a refreshing experience it was!

Also, even though Uncle Sam keeps all your email for you entire lifetime at U.S. Taxpayer expense (why U.S. citizens put up with this is unknown) your ISP does not. By cleaning out all your old email you get back a small measure of privacy as this correspondence can no longer be read by the whole world! You ISP has to maintain it for a while but they will eventually purge it from their databases.