How do I move my Thunderbird-based email from one machine to another?

The Secret Word: Profile

Thunderbird uses what it calls "profiles" to locate all of the information associated with your email. Your profile folder encapsulates everything about your email: mail, mail folders, email accounts, contacts, installed extensions and so on.

Thus copying your Thunderbird based email from one machine is a simple process:

• Close Thunderbird on the source machine (the machine on which you currently have your email).

• Install Thunderbird on the destination machine (the machine on which you want to have your email).

• Run it once on the destination machine, configure nothing, and exit.

• Locate the profile folder on the destination machine.

• Erase the contents of the profile folder on the destination machine.

• Locate the profile folder on the source machine.

• Copy the contents of the entire profile folder and all sub folders from the source machine to the destination.

• Run Thunderbird on the destination machine.

That's all there is to it.

Get Thunderbird

I'm going to assume that you're running the latest version of Thunderbird, as I was.

Download and install the latest version of Thunderbird on the machine to which you want to move your email.

Run Thunderbird once and it'll prompt you to begin configuring your email. Cancel that. We do not want to configure anything. With that out of the way, close Thunderbird.

This step was necessary to cause Thunderbird to create the profile folder into which we're about to copy our information.

While you're at it, close Thunderbird on the source machine.

Finding Profiles

There's a support article on locating profiles that covers it for other operating systems, but in a nutshell here's what worked for me on Windows 7:

In the folder C:\Users\LeoN\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird (where "LeoN" is replaced with your own Windows login account), there exists a file "profiles.ini". That's a simple text file that you can examine with Notepad, or "Type" at the Windows Command prompt. Mine looked like this:

What that tells us is that the full path to the folder we care about is:

Yours will be different, of course - it won't be "LeoN", and that "8h1k0c0z" will probably be something else.

It's in that folder that everything is stored. And I do mean everything.

Optional: Choose Your Own Location

Even though you don't need to do this I'm going to mention it because it's what I do to keep things a little clearer on my machine.

You can change the location of the profile folder by editing profiles.ini on the destination machine before you move.

On my machine I changed two lines:

That tells Thunderbird that my profile is stored in f:\doc\thunderbird - a folder I created. On my machine "F:" is a encrypted TrueCrypt volume.

Moving Day

Regardless of whether you changed it to a folder of your own choosing or left it to whatever that first run of Thunderbird set it to, we start with a simple step.

IMPORTANT: this step is performed on the destination machine, the machine you're moving to, the machine that does not yet have your email on it.

Make sure that the profile folder on the destination machine is empty. That initial run of Thunderbird may have placed some information there that we simply do not need, and we don't want to confuse subsequent steps.

Now the heavy lifting.

Copy the complete contents of the profile folder on the source machine to the profile folder of the destination machine.

It doesn't matter how you do it; it could be over your network, using CD-ROMs or DVDs, using a USB thumbdrive or hard disk, or any other way you have of copying bits from one machine to another.

What does matter is this:

• All folders and sub-folders in the profile folder are copied.

• All files are copied.

In my case, I created a zip file of the entire profile folder contents on the source machine, copied that across my network to the destination machine, and then unzipped it place.

Believe it or not, you're done.

Run Thunderbird on the destination machine and you should find that all of your email, contacts, extensions and whatnot have all been transferred over.

I simply pressed "Get Mail" and picked up where I'd left off.

And my laptop is now running that hours-long hard disk diagnostic.