Can AT& T Yahoo email folder be sinked into Ubuntu email & then Exported?

Ubuntu
1

I have AT& T Yahoo email with a folder full of replies to me that I want to export to a TEXT FILE (.txt) and then put into a Word Processing program. I wrote Yahoo tech support and they replied that it’s not currently possible.

I have Ubuntu 18.4 as a dual boot on my Windows 10 PC and it has the email system that comes with Ubuntu, I’ve forgotten the name for a moment.

  • Is it possible to get all of those saved replies into an Ubuntu email file folder if I name it the same as in Windows 10 Yahoo email?
  • Could I then export those files, each has several pages, into a text (.txt) file and put into a WP file for more processing?

I have over 1300 files / replies covering a number of years so it’s not in the realm of possible to start 1 by 1 to open, find and copy what I want to put into a WP file.

Any suggestions are most welcome.

Thanks,

Pat

2

Pat, are you using the std AT&T/Yahoo account or the premium?

You can setup Thunderbird to pull all the emails from Yahoo.
There are a couple of ways to go here. You could use maildir format to store emails and then write a script to process each email.

Another option is to create a gmail account, pull all yahoo into that and then for each email chain - which could be 2 to however many - show original and then copy and paste that conversation into a file. Slow but doable.

WP file? Word Perfect?

I do not believe there is a simple way to do it so it will be a process.

3

I recommend this, because I tried to do the same thing, that is explained in the original post, some time ago with Thunderbird and failed horribly. I ended up saving each e-mail manually, one by one, in frustration.

4

Akito, you failed with maildir or getting each mail into a file?

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I failed with the Thunderbird GUI. Never tried it with a CLI tool like maildir.

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Ah, yea, got it.

I worked on a project where we did this and its not as easy as it
sounds (on paper). But, if the OP can script - it helps.

7

@Rosika shared this method with me and it worked great on a smallish folder with a couple dozen messages in it.

i used thunderbird to get all of the messages downloaded and the ImportExportTools NG add-on to do the exporting. installing thunar made the batch renaming easier, but probably wasn’t strictly necessary.

  1. for the first run only, in ImportExportTools NG settings Misc tab click “Add date to the file properties”.
  2. right-click on the folder that you want to export
  3. hover over the ImportExportTools NG entry in the context menu to expand a second menu.
  4. hover over “Export all messages in the folder” to be presented with a menu of export format options.
    4b. it would probably help to have created the export directory on your system before getting this far.
  5. i chose plain text.
  6. after this is where thunar could be helpful with batch renaming.
  7. in the export folder, sort all files according to date with the oldest email listed first.
  8. mark all messages (ctrl + a).
  9. press F2 to open a batch renaming window. or click on the Edit menu and then choose Rename.
  10. in the uppermost selection box at left, choose “Numbering” to number all messages starting from the oldest with 1.
  11. i didn’t change any of the other options and clicked on “Rename Files”.
  12. open a terminal from within the respective directory. or open a terminal and cd to the appropriate directory.
  13. run the command cat *.txt > name_of_file.txt

i quite agree that possibly looks a bit complicated, but it took way longer to type out than it did to set it up and run it the first time :slight_smile:

2 Likes
8

Thank You!!

This will be a big help.

Pat