Moving Thunderbird from one PC to another.

[richardm]

I have a new PC and want to move my Mozilla Thunderbird mail stuff onto it. I've copied the contents of my Thunderbird profile directory from one PC to another, but when I start Thunderbird it doesn't seem to pick up the changes, prompting me to enter new account details and so on.

I got a bunch of "Do you want to replace file x" messages when copying, so I'm fairly confident I'm in the right place with the profile. Anything else I need to do, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

[vbloke]

Your mail files are inside your profile, in the Mail and (if you use IMAP) ImapMail folders. Each mail folder (Inbox, Sent, etc.) is stored as two files — one with no extension (e.g. INBOX), which is the mail file itself (in "mbox" format), and one with an .msf extension (e.g. INBOX.msf), which is the index (Mail Summary File) to the mail file. Tell the other program to import mail from the file with no extension.

If you want to transfer a mail file to another Mozilla profile or another installation of Mozilla, simply put the mail file into the other installation's Mail folder.

[richardm]

If you want to transfer a mail file to another Mozilla profile or another installation of Mozilla, simply put the mail file into the other installation's Mail folder.

I thought I'd done that. I'll check to see whether I really have or not. If all else fails I'll try importing it. Thanks!

[Mongrel]

You also have to pull your Profile folder across (C:\Documents and Settings\xxUserNamexx\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles) to the same location on the new computer and then edit the Profiles.ini to the Profile name.

From my system. My profile folder name is lxfinf0z.default and my .ini file reads;
[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/zian4gb0.default


Obviously the bolded bit is the one to match up with your folder name

:)

[Mongrel]

Damn, that'll teach me to post late at night :( Corrected version below


From my system. My profile folder name is lxfinf0z.default and my .ini file reads;
[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/lxfinf0z.default


Obviously the bolded bit is the one to match up with your folder name

:)