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In an external hard drive I have a backup of my email when I use Thunderbird (late 2009), it i around 12G. Now I need to find some old messages and using OS X Lion, I wonder how could I access and search through all that email messages, not importing all email to my laptop's hard drive. I wonder if using Thunderbird (last OS X version or a previos one) one can just tell Thunderbird to read all email from those files but not importing them.
Along similar lines you can add a separate dummy email account to TB and tell it that the local files are stored on the external drive (and never check for new messages, etc). The mail server settings can be set to something that looks valid like 'dummy.someplace.invalid' at the default port. Tell it the local directory is cooresonding folder the external where the backup files are. – martineau – 2012-06-09T16:49:40.960