Can Thunderbird run on a synched network drive?

[jsauter]

I'm considering using Thunderbird as an IMAP client to our corporate email. Policy dictates that we store all email on a network drive (thanks, SOX). But I would like to be able to access my email folders offline as well. SO: does anyone know whether Thunderbird can reliably operate on a network drive that is sync'ed (using Windows 7 file synchronization) to the local hard drive? This was not possible with Outlook due to file locking. I'm worried that Thunderbird might have similar problems with trying to use a sync'ed drive and that either Thunderbird will fail or Windows sync won't work correctly.

Thanks!

[RussB]

Sorry I cannot answer directly, however. If you use IMAP you can leave all the emails and files where ever they happen to be and just mirror them into the IMAP client, downloading only as needed. Nothing will get moved or deleted from the accessed files. So provided the files are available to your security credentials and in the correct format there is no reason for not being able to do what you want.

[jsauter]

Thanks, but unfortunately that won't work. All email on the Exchange server is deleted after 90 days. I need to maintain a copy of the email I want to keep longer in a local folder.

[RussB]

You can do that too, simply make a message filter that copies everything to a local directory.
T'bird is very versatile, but you do need to discover all of its tools and learn how to use them. Plus if you do not see what you want search for an Add-on or write your own.

[jsauter]

I was able to run some experiments and at least for the short time that I ran the experiment, I was able to accomplish what I wanted: I set up Thunderbird local folders on a network drive that was also synced to my local drive. I could access the folders when I was connected to the network and when I was disconnected. Windows Sync seemed to be happy to synchronize the files even when Thunderbird was running and Thunderbird seemed to be happy to have its local folders located on a synced drive.

Now my problem is that corporate has decided to shut down the IMAP interface so I am back to ground zero on a solution to my initial problem. But that is another story not relevant to this thread.