moving thunderbird to a new computer
Thunderbird stopped sending and receiving emails. I installed a new copy of thunderbird on another computer. After some time I was able to get it functional there. I would now like to have the same mail folder structure on the new machine as the old and import all my old information. I have exported the contents of the old Thunderbird profile to a usb drive. There are a large number of files and folder - 167 to be exact. The path the to the profile folder on my old computer was ....AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\t3ozjfx.default. This is the 'Local directory' in the Server Settings on the old computer. The path to Profile folder on the new installation is also ...AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\ but then there are two profile type files. One called t3ozjfx.default as before and another called test.default. The 'Local directory' in the Server Settings on the new computer is .....AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\t3ozjfjx.default\ImapMail\mail.cts.com-1.au It took me a great deal of effort to get emails sending and receiving properly on the new machine. It should have been just a matter of having the correct port addresses, server name, and encription method. However one had to fiddle with the local directory path to get operational
My question is given the above should I be able to get my old email file structure and the contents of those files onto the new computer by using the import facility in thunderbird. I would also like have the 'sent' messages on the old computer on the new computer. Will the thunderbird import operation be able to do this using the profile file information I put on the usb memory.
I hope I have not been too tedious in asking this question. It would be an immense relief if I could get Thunderbird on my new computer to have all the contents and folder structure that I had on the old computer.
sincerely yours
Devin Trussell Melbourne Australia
All Replies (3)
On the copying, there may be a problem with the files. hard to detect. You have another option. You say the old computer stopped retrieving mail. I don't know the severity of that, but if interested, you could directly copy with windows the entire profile from old computer directly to new computer. If nothing else, that should ensure that the entire profile, bit for bit, was copied intact. If interested, here are the steps: - on new PC, copy c:\users\<yourid>\appdata\roaming\thunderbird to any other folder for safekeeping. - on old PC, copy that same folder to USB stick and from there to new PC (TB must NOT be running on eithr machine) - start TB on new PC and assess what is there. You should have exactly what was on old PC. If you can get it to read and write, you're done. - if you feel it was unsuccessful, you can exit TB and copy the backup you created back to same place.
That worked for 99%. Somewhere along the line I have lost the original sent folder contents but I can live with that. Thanks for all your help.
You're welcome. I'm glad you salvaged most of your stuff.