Q - can I import a dump of .eml emails into TB so that they keep their date order and maybe original folder setup?

Dear Paolo and Christopher - you kindly invited questions, so ...

My wife's small business pays NetworkSolutions (a) to provide and protect her domain name URL and (b) to provide email and email boxes for her small staff at her domain name. So far, all the staffers are accessing their emails by using a browser and going to Network Solution's mail page and logging in. It works. No one is using an email client.

Now, some employees have left -- four over the past five years -- and we have continued to pay NetworkSolutions to maintain their email boxes with all their emails, but that's becoming expensive. So we'd like to download those ex-employee emails in a safe and usable format, then terminate those particular email boxes with NetworkSolutions and reduce that expense.

NetworkSolutions says they can send me a zip with all the emails of any email box, in .eml format. So I need an email client that can read those many .eml emails locally and (I hope) automatically organize them by their original folders (like Inbox and Sent and maybe more) and in the usual date order. Maybe this is "Import" but I'm not sure.

1. With your Import Export Tools NG add-on, can Thunderbird do this? Will I lose things along the way, like email dates (for typical date sorting), original email folder locations, attachments? FYI - I have never used Thunderbird. Also FYI -- We're all on Win 10 Pro with ESU, and some time next year we will update to Win 11.

2. Or ... should I NOT download those .eml zips but instead install Thunderbird (or another email client) clean and somehow point it to each ex-employee's email box ON NetworkSolutions and ask Thunderbird to import them for permanent local storage? (And how do I do that, maybe using your add-on?)

3. Ideally, each Import into Thunderbird for each ex-employee will be a different top-level group of emails for that ex-employee, not mixing their separate emails into one basket. Again, possible, and how to do?

4. What do I not know that I should be asking?

Your responses will be much appreciated! Please send links to tutorials. Please also say whether or not you've actually done this yourself.

Thanks.