Have you accidentally Unticked the section?

filters do seem to be the best way to automate a solution, but it'll need to be set up separately on each client.

You mean each Account? Of course.

Oh Whoopee !!

So somewhere along the line here I managed tp move the whole of the Inbox I'm testing on to Local Folders. Which emptied the IMAP Inbox.

No problem. Just selected all and copied it back.

Until I went to the live machine ... which is running POP3 on the same server Inbox ....

Network Acronis backup copy from 5pm to the rescue!

It could all be done fairly simply with POP's and some message rules....,
too late I guess.
M

pop sucks, you suck. Go die in a fire.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Thunderbird Help itself seems to have trouble explaining what Local Folders are for. As it creates POP3 accounts outside them, and I have five POP3 main domains (POP3 servers) I receive from

Can you post a picture of this folder structure (LH pane) so I can see what you are getting at?

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

It could all be done fairly simply with POP's and some message rules....,
too late I guess.
M

Exactly how please?

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

What I want to achieve is permanent local copies of emails I haven't deleted, plus auto deletion of server-side after say 30 days as per my POP3 setup. TB doesn't seem to be able to do that, unless I haven't yet fully understood the Archiving system. It won't take long to investigate though.

This email managing thing is a bit of a nightmare when you have several PCs and work from different locations.
For your archive what might work for you is to POP your emails into TB local folders say once a week(10080 minutes), this would be after you have deleted all the unwanted and rubbish ones. And set each POP server to have mail deleted after 30 days. This way you will use IMAP on a regular daily basis and use the local folders for a local email archive.
If you set TB on your main PC as the only one to delete mail on server after 30 days you will ensure that you always get every email as a local copy on at least your main PC and as long as the others connect at least every 29 days then you will hopefully get synchronised local folders on all clients.

It is worth spending a lot of time setting this up initially to get it working how you want it.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Thunderbird Help itself seems to have trouble explaining what Local Folders are for. As it creates POP3 accounts outside them, and I have five POP3 main domains (POP3 servers) I receive from

Can you post a picture of this folder structure (LH pane) so I can see what you are getting at?

If you look at the link in 12eason's post of 20:08 you will get the idea, except he has one Account with a lot of sub-folders.

I have 5 Accounts, holding 7 domains, ie one for RobertoS, one personal, one a domain used for disposable email addresses to give to online shops etc., one for my O2 email account, and one for an association that I provide a website for, with its email service. I have far fewer sub-folders within each than he has though - which is understandable. It's a very flexible piece of software.

When you create an email account in Thunderbird it creates it in that pane, but outside Local Folders. It is perfectly simple to set up sub-folders within Local and message rules to sort stuff from the true account Inbox to those, but given 5 accounts it is simpler to do it within the individual accounts.

The solution that seems to work, except being new to IMAP I screwed up, is to set up the sub-folders and rules on each server, thus automatically duplicating the layout and sorting onto both client machines and keeping the same structure for webmail access if necessary. Then every so often to use the Archive function within Thunderbird to shift stuff into a single Inbox per Account, as by then the sub-folders within accounts become relatively unimportant.

Archiving to Local Folders removes the mail from the Account sub-folders and therefore from the server. Which in turn removes them from the other machine. OK - the archive is only on one machine, but that will be the one with a daily back-up to a network disc or similar. (Needs review as mentioned earlier).

Thunderbird could be better in this area, as although you can set up simple archiving rules, selecting a range and triggering a run are both manual, unlike the Message Rules/Filters that 12eason referred to for "more than nn days old". The Help system seems to stop round about the time Version 3 was released, so can be garbage for Version 5, and googling specific topics for it can give clues but tends to be at geek level rather than practical as in the method I just described. Even some 2011 stuff about archiving looks like tripe.