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Comment by ShadowBanThis01 | Hacker News Reader

I hadn't looked at Thunderbird since about that time. I trashed it back then because there was no way to export your filters, in order to copy them to other computers... an absurd deal-breaker. Has that been resolved, by the way?

A few years ago I got my parents new computers. Sadly they are Windows machines, since that's what they're used to. After finding Microsoft's E-mail client to be monumentally defective trash, I installed Thunderbird for them. What a pleasant surprise. It worked well, looked good, and it downloaded all 15,000+ messages from each of their AOL accounts. Yep, AOL.

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Thunderbird (like Firefox) has a profile folder. If you copy that to another machine everything should be the same on that new machine. I have been doing this since probably 2009 and I make use of filters.

It's absurd that this function (filter import/export) hasn't been built into the application. Why should people have to scrounge around in user directories (after having to look up the appropriate location for whatever platforms they're using)?

Also, can you have global filters? I don't want filters per E-mail account.

The filter configuration for an account is in a text file in your profile, in a location like ImapMail/imap.example.org/msgFilterRules.dat

Copying these files around and editing them by hand works fine.

Thanks for the info. That's pretty clumsy, when an import and export function would seemingly be straightforward to implement.

> I hadn't looked at Thunderbird since about that time. I trashed it back then because there was no way to export your filters, in order to copy them to other computers... an absurd deal-breaker. Has that been resolved, by the way?

I don't think it has been, but I'm hopeful that the upcoming Thunderbird Sync feature will support syncing filters. I know they are only focused on syncing email account credentials right now, but that's honestly the last thing I care about syncing. More important are all the other little settings, such as filters, that are a huge pain to remember to manually change on all my computers.

Thanks for the reply. It's aggravating that this remains unaddressed. I don't even care about "syncing." All we need is to be able to export them to a file and then import them to another installation.

It may not be popular to say this about free software, but WTF? That is simply stupid.

And the apologist brigade downvotes uncomfortable facts yet again.

Your lack of desire for syncing is neither uncomfortable nor a fact.

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