3

I got a lot of emails with uncompressed formats (like bmp, txt, ...) that I want to keep inside my IMAP-inbox, so I can access them from all my devices (Windows, Linux, ios, Android).

Those emails take much disk space and bandwidth on synchronizing.

How could I compress them retrospectively?

1. workaround

One workaround for me is to compress them after I received them:

  1. Move the email into the drafts folder.
  2. Edit the email there. (For example, remove the attachment and add a it again after you compressed it, or use the Auto Compress File Addon in Thunderbird)
  3. Save the draft email
  4. Move it from your draft-folder back to your inbox. (without sending it)

There are two big drawbacks in this approach:

  1. The timestamp changes, so the mail seems to be received just now.
  2. The sender-email changes to your own.

2. workaround

Another, a bit better workaround would be to forward that email to myself and compress the attachment this time.

Then I could delete the attachment from the original mail and will only see it if I look at the whole conversation.

Is there a solution to this?

I don't want to archive the attachments outside of Thunderbird.

I want to keep them inside my IMAP-mail-folder, so I have them on all my email-clients on all my devices.

The best way would be a Thunderbird addon that does the job where I could press "compress Attachment" on every email. (But there only exist addons that compress before sending.)
see also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=852095

rubo77
  • 5,218

2 Answers2

1

If on windows, you could simply compress the directory where Thunderbird stores your mail.

On Linux, you can do this also but need something like Fusecompress

In either of these cases, this is only compressing the actual email messages and would not be as good (in the case of BMPs) as converting them to jpegs with compression. But it is transparent and fairly easy

SuperMagic
  • 943
1

If you have your own server you can install MailScanner and set "Zip Attachments = yes" in the configuration - this will combine all incoming attachments into a single .zip file.

When it comes to a client-specific solution you might be out of luck as incoming email integrity happens at the server-side unless you have a server that allows you to explicitly change that.

CoryG
  • 344