You could make a copy of the profile, then just delete the Local Folders folder from your copy before using it with another installation. But there may be some ambiguity in what you mean by "local folders" versus what I have in mind when saying "Local Folders".

Note that whatever you do, in the case of IMAP accounts it will download whatever it can see in your account folders - unless you intervene and unsubscribe from any folders you don't need to see.

I guess you could go a bit further and actually delete the entire Mail and ImapMail folders from the profile copy (which would guarantee zero carryover from your existing profile), but of course with IMAP it would try synchronize to the server, so again we come back to unsubscribing unwanted folders.

Personally all my useful accounts use IMAP specifically to make sure that all messages are accessible on all devices (two laptops, a desktop, a tablet and a phone), with Local Folders being used only for things that are inherently local (Saved Searches) or things that demand Local Folders (RSS feeds and newsgroups.) In practice in setting up a new machine I'd want all the local stuff to be retained, so I don't fully understand your wish to separate it it out.

Thx for the reply Zenos.

As I said I have several e-mail accounts. And I have several correspondents (hundreds over the years, besides my friends who are largely the same).

I prefer having separate directories for each friend and each company or subject. So, in each directory there may be messages from/to more than one of my e-mail accounts. I keep my e-mails locally in my main PC (otherwise I would need to have several copies of some of these folders (one each in each account's server).

I believe that lately one may have all accounts (even by different providers) collected in one main account. For one thing that would now probably be too much of a hassle to setup (upload all those e-mails to the server) and -most importantly- taking into account hotmail's and gmail's screw ups with security that they have dumped on us (closing our accounts), if this had happened with my "main" sump account, I would have lost everything...

I have several local folders, listed under "Local Folders/Archive" on the left (under the server folders of the e-mail accounts. However, the Local Folders folder in my profile is empty, so there would be nothing to delete (besides the "Local Folders" folder).

Maybe forgot to clarify that the additional PCs, I want TB installed in, are "secondary" PCs mainly used for non-regular or emergency e-mail checking/sending, such as my Windows tablet, that I have along when travelling, or a PC in the office.

Hopefully some day, also my Android tablet and phone too...

Hmm, if you're using POP-connected accounts then some very careful dissection would be needed to extract or remove specific folders. I tend to forget that anyone would deliberately choose POP over IMAP these days.

I like IMAP; everything is available, regardless of which device I'm using - so long as I can get online. If I can't get online, then I can't send messages anyway, so an email client becomes somewhat irrelevant.

I'd say try deleting the Mail and ImapMail folders from the copied profile, install with that and see if it has delivered what you want.

Unified Folders is not new, and Global Inbox dates back to when OE was the predominant email client. So the ability to combine all messages into a common pool is not new, but neither option would help you here. Global Inbox only works with POP accounts and newly arrived messages; it doesn't do anything for historical collections. And since Unified Folders is a presentational trick of showing similar folders collated as if one, it doesn't fundamentally change the underlying storage.

Thank you for the reply, Zenos.

Afraid I would mess sthng up, I bit the bullet and redid everything by hand (manually entered all accounts' info).

However, since you mentioned it: you are saying that unified folders only work w/ pop accounts. Does POP not mean I need to keep all e-mail locally (not on the provider's server for online access)?

POP automatically stores everything locally. In Thunderbird, it can also share a common Inbox so all incoming email arrives in one place. Users migrating in from some other email clients would be accustomed to this and so it is supported here.

IMAP cannot share a common Inbox, because the Inbox you see in Thunderbird is a view of Inbox on the server, so combining Inboxes across multiple accounts has some interesting technical challenges. However, Unified Folders allows all the Inboxes to be aggregated into one virtual Inbox, so it is another way of presenting all incoming messages in one place. And this can be applied to other common folders, such as Junk, Trash, Sent, Drafts.

IMAP makes a local temporary store which one should think of as a cache, since it is there to speed up browsing and searching and allow offline viewing of email, but this store is dynamic and tracks what is going on in the server. So if a message is deleted on the server, it will also be deleted from the synchronized cache. With IMAP if you want a permanent local copy of a message, then it's best to copy it to Local Folders, which is on your hard disk and independent of any server.

So with IMAP, you could delete the ImapMail folder from your profile because the data is all on the server. But your POP and Local Folders are stored under Mail, and since that is likely to be your one and only copy of these messages, you need to think about how to protect it against accidents and failures.

So to copy just account settings etc, I'd suggest you delete Mail and ImapMail from the template profile. But if there is anything in Mail that you want to preserve and transfer it gets more complicated, and this is why I so much prefer IMAP; everything is on the server and doesn't need to be transferred if you set up another email client. Of course, you should also make local backups of your profile in case of loss of the online storage.