Moving emails from POP3 to IMAP in Thunderbird

[beigewill]

Hello. Aquamail is a life-saver after being a blackberry guy- thanks!

I am trying to switch over from a POP3 account to IMAP in Thunderbird.
I have both accounts in Thunderbird, but have disabled the POP3 account.
I am moving my messages from the Inbox on my pop3 to the inbox on my imap and each time I move old messages over, say 500 emails from May, they will appear as the most current emails in my IMAP folder on Aquamail; I can not see the emails I received today, this week, or this month.

I would like to revert back to having my most recently received mails appear in my Aqua inbox and can not think how I would do that other than deleting the old emails from my server. I tried changing the view order from last to first and first to last hoping that would do the trick but it did not. I am then thinking that if I remove the account from Aqua and then install it again it may sort it out in the right order...? Any suggestions? Thanks!

[Al]

Maybe I'm wrong but this is based on my own recent experience merging several email account:

I think the way most IMAP client work is they fetch some messages from the mail server (let's say they ask for the 25 or 50 most recent) and then sort them out according to your client settings (more recent first for instance). However, what happens when you mix tons of archived messages in a single folder, the most recent according to the mail server will be the latest message saved in that folder. So if your archives were stored in the folder recently, the server will probably assign them a higher 'sequence number' than more recent messages. So when the IMAP client fetches some 'recent messages', it might receive archives first so the only thing for the client to sort by date is old messages...

So what I did is to clean up my IMAP folders by reuploading all my messages in a single operation. That way the client performing the update manages to have more recent messages with higher sequence ids...

Anyway I'm not 100% sure about the explanation here but I'm sure it now works!

good luck

[Kostya Vasilyev]

100% correct.... IMAP spec says that messages are ordered by when they are uploaded to or received by the server...

...and my app and other Android mail apps depend on that to correspond with message dates (which it does under normal conditions). However, uploading a bunch of messages (esp. from Thunderbird - it seems to not care about ordering at all, when archiving too) can very well happen out of order.

Desktop mail apps have it easy - they can ask for the entire list of messages every time.

[beigewill]

 
Ok, thanks guys! All part of learning about IMAP...