Download works well. Extraction of messages ends up as .mbox. I know it is a UNIX type but have to find out how to open it to see indivdual messages.

Arno,

It is just a text file. Any text editor such as Notepad work to view the file and messages in it.

--
Gerald

Mark,
Splitting Account Messages by Group Options Since I belong to many groups, the full account download is quite large. It is also very tedious to sort through the messages for a specific group. For these reasons, it would be nice if there were a group specific option to do the export. As an alternate solution, the messages could be split out by group in the full account download.
--  Gerald

Exporting for Closed Accounts Many of the groups I belong to here are from accounts migrated from Yahoo. As part of my migration, I also took the opportunity to rid myself of Yahoo email addresses and ended up combining my groups into one non-Yahoo email address account. The result of this is that a lot of my migrated content is no longer associated with my account.

I can determine the posterid numbers for posts that were made on Yahoo. It seems that the posterid is the same across all groups. Is there a way that I could also export data based on posterid? I am not sure if / how that could happen. Perhaps the issue really is whether or not I can reclaim an account that I closed and combine it into my current account.

--
Gerald

It might be sensible to add a section in the exported information for the user's account details. I'm thinking of information such as the e-mail address, aliases, settings such as personal name, preferences for each group. All of those might be considered part of what the GDPR considers personal information: "your" data.

The download itself worked well when I tried it.

(Aside: not all messages in my .mbox file are usable in a text editor, because they were imported from Yahoo! Groups where they were given Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64.)

 - Mark (not the Mark, this one's someone else)

Arno,
There is a mbox viewer here -> https://sourceforge.net/projects/mbox-viewer/
Works pretty well.
Toby

On 05/16/2018 05:59 PM, Shal Farley wrote:

Thunderbird's developers seem to think that importing mbox files ought to be as obscurely documente as practical.

Take a look at their documentation on importing, or exporting contacts.
It is even more obtuse, and inadequately documented.

Though trivial to do once you figure out where to create a folder to copy the mbox file(s) into.

Install and use the _Import Export Extension_.

jonathon

Thanks all, on the mbox advice.
Arno

Gerald,

... it would be nice if there were a group specific option to do the
export. As an alternate solution, the messages could be split out by
group in the full account download.

I agree with both solutions.

The first because I was surprised that the button directly launched the export -- I was expecting to see at least a confirmation page, but a page with checkboxes to select the primary group(s) and subgroup(s) would be even better.

I suspect that others may have been surprised as well, leading to more exports than were actually intended and downloaded.

The second because I think that having separate mbox files for each group (or subgroup) would be much more natural and manageable. When I keep messages in my email I do so in separate folders for each group. So I would want them separated that way even when exporting more than a single group at a time.

Shal

Shal . . .

On Sun, 20 May 2018 17:59:01 -0700, "Shal Farley" <shals2nd@gmail.com>
wrote:

The second because I think that having separate mbox files for each
group (or subgroup) would be much more natural and manageable. When I
keep messages in my email I do so in separate folders for each group. So
I would want them separated that way even when exporting more than a
single group at a time.

I keep my messages separated also in different email folders and use
rules to route the group posts to their respective folders.

Can Mbox files be opened and sorted by groups somehow, or just extract
group 1 files, then group 2, and so on?

Donald

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who
speak it. --Selwyn Duke

Donald,

Can Mbox files be opened and sorted by groups somehow, or just extract
group 1 files, then group 2, and so on?

With Thunderbird I'm sure I could filter or sort them by the To: address or the group subject tag. And then copy or move them into other folders group by group.

With other mbox readers that might depend on its capabilities; but I think it is likely that any full email client application (OE, Forte, and others) could do this as well.

Shal