possible to set columns globally?

[ginahoy]

I recently built a new machine and installed the latest version of Thunderbird. I successfully copied my profile from old machine, however, my column settings were lost.

Hopefully there's a way to globally set column preferences. I have more than 800 folders and sub-folders in my Local Folders tree!

[tanstaafl]

I'm not aware of a way to set them globally, but you can set them for the top folder in an account and then use the "apply columns to" -> "folder and its children" at the bottom of the list box that you normally use to choose what columns should be enabled for the folder, to have all of the folders in that account use those settings. Its the weird little square widget at the far right of the columns, just above the vertical scrollbar.

[ginahoy]

Thanks. I'm familiar with the column setting icon, but had forgotten about the "apply to" setting at bottom of column list. I "only" have about 40 top level folders in the tree.

[tanstaafl]

You could create a virtual folder that contains all of your folders in all accounts, per http://kb.mozillazine.org/Saved_Search . That would let you set it once and apply it to all of your folders in one step. The problem is I suspect it will only be valid within the virtual folder, the "real" folders won't inherit that.

Did you copy the entire profile when you moved it to the new PC? I would have expected the folder settings to persist unless you copied just what you thought were the essential files to the new profile.

[ginahoy]

I don't recall if I copied everything or selected files. Seems like I recall looking at timestamps of profile files on my old machine and googling filenames I wasn't sure about. I was running FF v35 on the XP machine so it didn't really surprise me that something broke.

I tried Saved Search as virtual folder and it worked! Thanks!