Windows Live Mail, POP3 > IMAP, transferring folders and other neuroses

In days of yore you'd set up your email program to send messages through an SMTP server and receive them from a POP3 server. Nowadays with mobile 'phones there is another (™©® A.R.T) protocol called IMAP which allows simultaneous connections and lots of clever stuff.
The POP3 system was good as it allowed for automatic deletion of messages from the server after you'd received them.
A while ago, virginmedia.com implemented the IMAP protocol and the automatic POP deletion no longer worked so it meant logging on through a web browser occasionally to delete the clutter; this was also the only way to check the spam trap, so I decided to setup IMAP access.
All well and good until I tried to move the forty odd folders from one account to another, err you can't.
Windows Live Mail, hereinafter referred to as WLM,  has a Folders tab where you can do ⁵/₈ of bugger all.

The thought of creating another 40 folders and moving all the files wasn't all that appealing and then I realised that I didn't want to do that at all.

So archive stuff needs to go under the Storage Folders and not in the same area as before or they'll all be copied to the email server. Anyway, you still can't move them unless you cheat.

Close WLM if it's running.

This week, WLM stores the messages here:

C:\Users\Roland\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail\

so open that location in Windows Explorer and find your email account, in my case it's Blueyonder. d3a

Open that and copy the folders you cherish to a safe location, then copy them all from there to:

C:\Users\Roland\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail\Storage Folders

and here's a couple by way of an example.

Start WLM and have another look, you'll now see these two in the storage area

But there's more. Go back to Windows Explorer and you'll see this

Do all file copying with WLM dead or, better still, get a twelve year old to do it for you.

Time for a pint