[ubuntu-za] Mail between two versions of Thunderbird

[Wayne Abroue]

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 6:11 PM, Ian Whitfield
<whitfield at federalsaints.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 6:25 PM, Jan Greeff <jan at verslank.net> wrote
>>>
>>> >  Hi Peter, believe it or not, I a still trying to find a way to
>>> > transfer my mail profile from Thunderbird to Thunderbird on another drive. (
>>> > I have two hard drives on my machine, so when I upgrade, I can hopefully
>>> > backup all my work and do a clean install onto the second drive.) I have no
>>> > problem with my Open Office files and folders and the address books but the
>>> > e-mails are a problem.
>>> >
>>> >  What I did was to copy and paste the .thunderbird folder from the
>>> > drive that I want to back up into the .thunderbird folder on the spare
>>> > drive, but the result was that a new .thunderbird folder was created in the
>>> > existing .thunderbird. So now I have home/jan/.thunderbird/.thunderbird.
>>> >
>>> >  Do I now have to delete the first .thunderbird profile or how do I get
>>> > the program to pick up the copied profile?
>>> >
>>> >  Best wishes,
>
> I will watch this thread with interest!!!
>
> I have used Thunderbird since it started, first on Windows and for the last
> 3 years on Linux. Over this period I have had many computer crashes, (under
> Windows), upgrades to new machines, changes of HDDs etc and in all this time
> I have NEVER, EVER been able to transfer my old Mail, Address Books etc to
> the new system!!!
>
> I have Googled and followed all kinds of ideas but never found an answer.
>
> This should be VERY easy and straight forward but for some reason the
> Developers wrap it up in ... who knows what??
> This is not Rocket Science and keeping old eMail etc is important in this
> day-and-age. It SHOULD BE - move ONE Subdirectory/Folder and away you go
> again. Why isn't it this way????
>

It is actually, I've used thunderbird for years, with similar changes
of both Distro's and hardware's.

And yes it is as simple as pointing a file. My favourite trick was
running TB on my win partition and in linux TB was pointed to the
mounted win folder. So fully updated on both sides.
Never needed the import export facilities.

Wayne A