Securing Emails When Leaving HU
When leaving HU or, for example, when switching from a student account to an employee account, access to emails stored in the account will be lost once the account is locked. These emails can be secured beforehand.
For Employees: Please note that you may not be allowed to "take" all your emails with you. If these emails contain purely official data or relate to purely internal processes of HU, storing them in an external account would constitute an export of official data and thus a breach of data protection.
Save Emails in Another Email Account
Emails can be copied between different accounts configured in the same client between Imap accounts. Instructions for setting up various email clients (e.g., Thunderbird) can be found on our website.
Once both accounts are set up, emails in the source account can be marked and copied to the target account via a right-click -> Copy to. The CMS recommends copying emails instead of moving them. Local folders in the email client can also be used as the target account, but corresponding emails are only available on that device.
Individual or multiple emails can be copied between different folders or mailboxes in nearly any desktop or mobile client. The process is the same as copying or moving emails within a single account.
After selecting individual or multiple emails, they can be copied via the context menu ("Copy To", select destination account, select destination folder).
After copying, the emails will be available in the destination folder.
Similarly, entire folders can be copied or moved (context menu of a folder, "Copy To", select destination account, select destination folder). Selected folders will be created as subfolders of the chosen destination folder.
Save Emails Locally
Emails from the HU account can also be saved locally. The easiest way to do this is to place them in local folders in the mail client — this method is completely analogous to copying them to another Imap account. Please note that local folders, as the name suggests, only exist on your device and are usually not synchronized.
If emails are only to be retained as a backup copy but are not actively needed in a mail client, they can be exported as normal files. For this purpose, install, for example, the Thunderbird add-on ImportExportTools NG. After successful installation, you can export complete email accounts or selected folders as local files.
When exporting individual folders (context menu of a folder, "ImportExportTools NG", "Folder Export (mbox)", "As mbox File"), you can additionally select the format in which the data will be saved. Options include mbox files (a single file containing all emails) or structured formats with individual files per email.
Import Emails
Importing previously exported data is possible in the reverse way. Using the ImportExportTools NG in Thunderbird, emails can be imported from various sources or formats. To do this, specify the files created during the export.
If you have requested an extract of your mailbox or your personal data and do not have access to your HU account, we will provide your mailbox in a format that can be easily imported using the ImportExportTools NG. This format is based on the maildir format, which is also used on the mail servers. In this format, folders in the file system correspond to the folders in your mailbox, and individual emails are files in the file system. Emails in the maildir format are named according to the timestamp of delivery and have the eml format.
To make mailboxes easier to provide, they are packed as a tar.gz archive.
The export in mbox format (context menu of the destination folder, "ImportExportTools NG", "Import mbox Files", "All mbox Files from Directory (with sdb Structure)") uses the SDB structure to separate folders and emails within a folder. This structure can be imported via the corresponding menu item. Please note that mbox files can only be imported into local folders.
After importing, the folder structure will be available as it was before the export.
In addition to entire folders, individual emails can also be imported (context menu of the destination folder, "ImportExportTools NG", "Import EML Messages," "Individual EML Messages").
Then, the emails to be imported must be selected in the file browser. On Windows, these should have the .eml file extension.
After a successful import, the emails will be displayed in the selected folder as if they had been delivered there or copied/moved.
The mailbox extracts provided by CMS are set up so that they can be imported into Thunderbird. To do this, first unpack the archive we provided.
On Windows, you can use the program 7-Zip; Unix/Linux and MacOS can usually unpack this format directly.
On a command line (Windows 10, Windows 11, MacOS, Unix/Linux), unpack tar.gz archives with tar -xzf huaccount.tar.gz. After unpacking, you will have a folder named after your HU account, containing the emails of the associated mailbox.
For importing into Thunderbird, first create a folder for the HU account's emails in the target account or in your local folders.
Then, in the context menu of this folder, select from which source you want to import emails (context menu of the destination folder, "ImportExportTools NG", "Import EML Messages," "All EML Messages from a Directory and Subdirectories").
Then, select the folder unpacked from the mailbox archive.
All emails, including the folder structure, will now be imported hierarchically and can subsequently be viewed in Thunderbird. Please note that imported emails are not marked as read by default.
