This is a text-only version of the following page on https://raymii.org: --- Title : Back Up Thunderbird Message Filters Author : Remy van Elst Date : 15-12-2013 URL : https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Thunderbird_Back_Up_Mail__Message_Filters.html Format : Markdown/HTML --- This tutorial shows you how to backup and restore the mail message filters in Thunderbird on multiple platforms. The filters are in a plain text file located in your thunderbird Profile folder. On Mac OS X for example this is under the `/Users//Library/Thunderbird/Profiles//ImapMail//` folder. (If you use IMAP.)

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The file is named `msgFilterRules.dat` and the contents look a bit like this: version="9" logging="no" name="From is: dan@sixgun.org" enabled="yes" type="17" action="Move to folder" actionValue="imap://user%40host.com@imap.server.com/Folder" condition="AND (from,is,dan@sixgun.org)" The above example moves any email coming from the email address `dan@sixgun.org` to the folder `Folder` on the IMAp account. To back up all the filters, do the following: * Close all instances of Thunderbird * Copy the file `msgFilterRules.dat` to a backup location. To restore the file, to the following: * Close all instances of Thunderbird * Copy the file `msgFilterRules.dat` back into your (possibly new) profile folder Under any normal Linux distro the path probably is like this: /home//.thunderbird/Profiles//ImapMail//msgFilterRules.dat For Mac OS X the path is like this: /Users//Library/Thunderbird/Profiles//ImapMail//msgFilterRules.dat For Windows the path probably is like this on pre Vista machines: C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\\ImapMail\\msgFilterRules.dat The latter versions of Windows (vista, 7, 8): C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\\ImapMail\\msgFilterRules.dat If you want to convert these Thunderbird rules to `.procmailrc` rules a script for that can be found [here: http://sourceforge.net/p/tbprocmailconv/code/HEAD/tree/tbprocmailconv.py][2] [1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=7435ae6b8212 [2]: http://sourceforge.net/p/tbprocmailconv/code/HEAD/tree/tbprocmailconv.py --- License: All the text on this website is free as in freedom unless stated otherwise. This means you can use it in any way you want, you can copy it, change it the way you like and republish it, as long as you release the (modified) content under the same license to give others the same freedoms you've got and place my name and a link to this site with the article as source. This site uses Google Analytics for statistics and Google Adwords for advertisements. You are tracked and Google knows everything about you. Use an adblocker like ublock-origin if you don't want it. All the code on this website is licensed under the GNU GPL v3 license unless already licensed under a license which does not allows this form of licensing or if another license is stated on that page / in that software: This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see . Just to be clear, the information on this website is for meant for educational purposes and you use it at your own risk. I do not take responsibility if you screw something up. Use common sense, do not 'rm -rf /' as root for example. If you have any questions then do not hesitate to contact me. See https://raymii.org/s/static/About.html for details.