What other email clients can read Zimbra files that I move off the C drive?

General discussion about Zimbra Desktop.
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Peter88
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Mar 11, 2018 1:39 am

What other email clients can read Zimbra files that I move off the C drive?

Post by Peter88 »

I've downloaded ten plus years of email (about 100K emails) from Yahoo using Zimbra Desktop. It did a great job!

I was looking forward to using Zimbra Desktop as an email client but unfortunately it won't work for me due to needing to keep my data files on an external drive. Zimbra Desktop requires them to stay in one location on the C: drive and I don't keep data on my C: drive.

I won't need to use Yahoo servers again for email but I do need to regularly look through ten plus years of email stored locally. My thought is to move the data folders from the Zimbra C: drive to my external drive but, what issues would I run into using another email client to read them? I see Zimbra has created (or downloaded from Yahoo), .msg files but what about proprietary indexes or anything else?

Now I have to start the search all over again for a good email client to use for local files. I'm sorry to say goodbye to Zimbra given that I'd so like to use it but not being allowed a choice on where to put my data files just doesn't work for me.

Thanks for any ideas.
Peter88
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Mar 11, 2018 1:39 am

Re: What other email clients can read Zimbra files that I move off the C drive?

Post by Peter88 »

My goal has been to download all my 10+ years of Yahoo mail (a Yahoo Plus account) and store it locally on an external hard drive as an archive. Zimbra Desktop was the only tool out of six I've tried that did the job of downloading the mail from Yahoo servers. But, it won't work as an interface to this locally stored email since Zimbra apparently requires data to be stored only on the C: drive and I need it on an external hard drive (please correct me if this is not right or there is a workaround). So, I'll have to move the Zimbra downloaded email to my external drive and use another tool to read it in local mode only.
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I've been experimenting and I find I can use Zimbra Desktop and do an export (Preferences--Import / Export) which creates a tgz file. Given my Yahoo mailbox had about 100K emails, I chose just a few folders to try this. I then used 7Zip to unpack the tgz file which created individual .eml files for each email message. I then was able to import those using EmClient (free for personal use) after manually creating the folders in eMClient. eMClient allows you to store your data anywhere you want.

I see there is a Backup option in Zimbra Desktop but I'm not sure just yet how that differs from using Export. It looks like with Backup, you can't select just certain folders but have to take everything which I'm afraid might take a very long time given I have over 100K emails.

I would recommend Zimbra Desktop for anyone who wants to download their Yahoo mail and has been having trouble doing so. The other six email clients I tried (eMClient included) all had difficulties, usually syncing or timeouts or missing emails, etc. Zimbra Desktop ran for over two days but downloaded everything successfully, even when I closed Zimbra one time by accident during the download. I just wish I could keep using it with the data stored on my external hard drive. With eMClient, the data will be local only so I can't connect again to sync with Yahoo if I wanted to but I'm not planning on using Yahoo for email anymore but will keep my account active for a few years.
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