How to stop Thunderbird from checking for new email (is it possible to archive an account?)
Background
I have an old email account that doesn't exist anymore. Its messages are saved in Thunderbird.
I want to keep that account in Thunderbird. However, because it doesn't exist anymore, I don't want it to sync with the online account anymore.
Question
Is it possible to "archive" the email account in Thunderbird, so that it stops checking for emails and trying to sync with the online account?
Attempted solutions
My first attempted solution was to go into Account Settings -> Server Settings -> uncheck both "Check for new messages at startup" and "Check for new messages every n minutes".
The problem is that if I click on "Get all new messages", it still tries to get new messages for that account. I then went into Account Settings -> Server Settings -> changed "Server Name" to "imap.nonexistent572.com" and "User Name" to "[email protected]". That is, I changed these to bogus addresses that don't exist. This seems like a really bad fix, I was wondering whether there's a better solution than creating bogus input. Thunderbird won't allow me to leave these fields empty, hence, so far, I had to fill it with bogus input
Solution 1:
Assuming the old account is a POP account, you can try the following:
- Go to
Account Settings > Server Settingsfor the account - Click on Advanced... in the "Message Storage" section
- If not already selected, select the "Inbox for a different account" radio button and, if necessary, select a different account's Inbox from the drop-down list (the particular account's Inbox shouldn't matter since there'll be no new mail from the old account)
- Uncheck "Include this server when getting new mail"
- Click OK
Source: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1292744
Alternatively, messages from an account can be archived as explained at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/archived-messages rather than keeping around a defunct account. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that such archiving would preserve any existing folder structure from the account.