Using new thunderbird with old ~/.thunderbird? [SOLVED]

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tld · Post by **tld** » Mon Dec 28, 2020 5:26 pm

First to just get my rant out of the way...If it were possible I'd never go withing a million miles of anything mozilla. I'd be using something like claws mail for sure, but because of my work and the fact that everyone out there insists on using HTML email (which I personally detest with a passion, but must be able to reply to in HTML) I'm pretty much forced to use thunderbird.</rant>

That aside, I'm installing on a new AMD machine currently. On my archaic x86 machine I was running a very old version of thunderbird (mail-client/thunderbird-52.9.1). On the new machine I'll be using the current stable (despite a lot of dependencies I don't like), which will be mail-client/thunderbird-78.6.0. I just installed that today.

There's no way I want to configure that from scratch. I copied my entire ~/.thunderbird directory to my home on the new machine. How on EARTH can I get the new version to use that? It wants to create a new profile, and it appears it's creating a ~/.mozilla directory. Nothing I've googled is answering this. I've found similar questions but no answer that works or makes sense.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Tom

nick_gentoo · Post by **nick_gentoo** » Mon Dec 28, 2020 5:50 pm

Hi, this was useful for me in the past: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_p ... hunderbird

Inside ~/.thunderbird, there is a profiles.ini file that defines the location of each profile.

tld · Post by **tld** » Mon Dec 28, 2020 6:17 pm

nick_gentoo wrote:Hi, this was useful for me in the past: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_p ... hunderbird

Inside ~/.thunderbird, there is a profiles.ini file that defines the location of each profile.

Thanks! Unlike everything else I've read that actually helped. All good! What I did specifically was:

a) On the new system, create and empty ~/.thunderbird directory.

b) Copy my existing profile folder from the old machine's ~/.thunderbird directory to the new systems ~/.thunderbird.

c) Ran "thunderbird -profilemanager" and chose Create New profile, and in that dialog used the "Choose Folder" button to choose the copied profile directory.

Worked like a charm! Thanks again.

Tom