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Migrating large volume of emails

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by Wayne Mery

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When I attempt to move a large number of emails (40k+) from one imap account to another in Thunderbird, after transferring these for a while the process stops for no reason, and I need to start it again. Does anyone have any ideas what could be causing the process to stop? I'm running with version 115.1.1 on MacOS Ventura 13.5.1 on a Mac mini.

When I attempt to move a large number of emails (40k+) from one imap account to another in Thunderbird, after transferring these for a while the process stops for no reason, and I need to start it again. Does anyone have any ideas what could be causing the process to stop? I'm running with version 115.1.1 on MacOS Ventura 13.5.1 on a Mac mini.

All Replies (3)

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Check your ram usage before and during the transfer. If that checks out, you might want to either try transferring in smaller batches (which can get annoying) or submitting a bug report on it. If you need help with the latter, reach out and I'll do my best to walk you through the process

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The memory usage looks ok; I have 16GB and 12.75GB is being used. Whilst the transfer process is running, Thunderbird is using 900MB and I've seen this go up to 1GB.

The process appears to stop when I'm not using the computer for a while and the lock screen is activated. I set the transfer running yesterday and continued to use the computer for several hours and the process continued with no issues, so cause appears to be when there is a period of inactivity. I assume this process should continue to run despite me not being active on the system? I'm not sure if this is an issue with Thunderbird or how macOS works?

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Try using a filter. Create a filter with the criteria for the messages you wish to move - a date range for example. Then run it on the folder that contains the source message. It will be slower but far more likely to succeed.