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It's been some (relatively short) time since Thunderbird finally obtained maildir storage support (I'm using Thunderbird 38.1.0 at the time of this writing). Unfortunately it appears it only applies to how Thunderbird itself stores mail internally, e.g. for IMAP/POP3 accounts. What I wish though, is to be able to read the contents of a typical /home/user/.maildir directory that contains mail locally delivered for a user (as an alternative to /var/spool/mail style delivery).

Now, the best idea I've come up with is symlinking a specially-created-for-the-purpose Inbox folder from Thunderbird's 'Local Folders' account to it, but Thunderbird seems to be unable to even notice the mail in it, Inbox appears empty (not even a restart helps).

I of course can revert to setting up a Thunderbird's movemail account with /var/spool/mail (after reconfiguring exim, which does local mail delivery, appropriately), but I honestly wish to not need to.

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  • I don't really have a tested solution, but how about running an IMAP server like Dovecot to serve your user's ~/.maildir? Then you can connect Thunderbird to it using IMAP. Dec 31, 2020 at 9:08

2 Answers 2

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As additional information for those wondering this same thing (which I had explored over this past summer for Thunderbird 60.8.0) I thought I would share the following, as I was hoping to couple my Thunderbird's maildir setup with mutt.

From a note in Mozilla's Support regarding Thunderbird and maildir:

Note – this is NOT full Maildir in the sense that most users, particularly Linux or mail administrators, know Maildir. You cannot point Thunderbird accounts to a mail server directory, nor do you get message flags stored with emails. See the wiki for more details

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/maildir-thunderbird

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Maildir

They do not state why this is so, just that it is so.

A check on the diffs between the headers of the emails are as follows.

Mutt, with vdirsyncer and offlineimap

< Return-Path: <[email protected]>
…

Thunderbird

> From - Fri Jul 26 21:00:32 2019
> X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
> X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
> X-Mozilla-Keys:                                                                                 
> Return-Path: <[email protected]>
…

Also, Thunderbird inserted a blank line at the bottom of its copy of the email.

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I think Tbird was designed to use the /home/user/mail dir format where mail boxes are single files. IF I remember, maildir format puts each message in a separate file. What you might try -- is an indirect way around the problem and that would be to install an IMAP server (like dovecot) that can read multiple formats (like maildir), and connect your Tbird to the local dovecot. I know the dovecot I use looks for new mail in the spool directory -- but it can also look for new mail under your home directory.

My email gets prefiltered as it comes in into separate mail folders (single files in my setup) on my linux server. The advantage to running my own imap client is I have multiple computers on multiple OS's with multiple usernames -- all of those can access the same mail store under dovecot -- whether I need to access it on the same machine or over my local net.

I keep toying with the idea of making it accessible via a webserver from outside my home, but haven't really had the need. Anyway, think of an imap server as a type of an "adaptor" for your data, so it can be fed into Thunderbird...?

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