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Tested on Thunderbird 31

If you want to drop some mailbox files in Thunderbird's "Local Folders" and for whatever reason you want them to be in a sub-folder, and you want to do this from the command line, it's not too hard, but you can't just mkdir. First, cd to the user's profile directory. On OS X, this is something like this:

cd /Users/$USERNAME/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/0h36crcv.default/Mail/Local Folders

To make a new subdirectory that will be visible to Thunderbird, just touch a zero length file, then make a sub-directory of the same name with a ".sbd" suffix. Put the mbox files in there. Then restart Thunderbird. It should create the requisite index files and *.msf files.

$ pwd
/Users/jwelcher/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/0h36crcv.default/Mail/Local Folders
$ touch newsub
$ mkdir newsub.sbd
$ cd newsub.sbd
$ cp ~/tmp/export-jwelcher-46513126.mbox newmbox
$ cp ~/tmp/export-jwelcher-46513284.mbox othermbox

Then restart Thunderbird. You should see the new mailboxes in a subfolder in Thunderbird.


If you find that they don't show up, especially if you have started up a new Thunderbird instance, under OS X, you might find that the profiles directory is quarantined, including the Mail/Local Folders, and this could prevent Thunderbird from viewing your mail:


[myhost:Local Folders]$ ls -lo@
total 16
-rw-------@ 1 jwelcher 0 Jul 9 16:12 Trash
 com.apple.quarantine 26 
-rw-r--r--@ 1 jwelcher 2537 Jul 9 16:38 Trash.msf
 com.apple.quarantine 26 
-rw-------@ 1 jwelcher 0 Jul 9 16:12 Unsent Messages
 com.apple.quarantine 26 
-rw-r--r--@ 1 jwelcher 1927 Jul 9 16:38 Unsent Messages.msf
 com.apple.quarantine 26

So you can recursively remove these quarantine ACLs:


$ cd ~/Library/Thunderbird
$ chmod -RN Profiles profiles.ini


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