Migrate Thunderbird profile to a different PC

[toadisland]

I tried to copy my TBird profile to a new machine, into a previously installed TBird, because I was having trouble with fonts. I copied the default profile to new installation, but that wasn't enough. Before I replace the whole TBird folder in Users/me/AppData/Roaming, I thought I should ask if that's what to do.

[DanRaisch]

See this article -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_ ... hunderbird
For a concise, less detailed version of the process, see this thread --
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... 5#p7251375

For an alternative approach, see tanstaafl's posts in this thread -- http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... #p14209121

[toadisland]

Thank you. I've been nearly always pleased with the responses I get here. However ...

The articles and contributions you suggested seemed to me complex. but they gave me ideas and suggested an easier (for me) way to move a profile.

I copied the older profile, name and all, the eight character name. I installed it in the new PC, in the Thunderbird profiles folder. I duplicated the "profiles.ini" file and edited it to name the profile from the older PC, renamed both .ini, files, restarted Thunderbird, and voilà.

I later had to tweak one of my server configurations. I don't know why and it may not be related.
So far, it seems all done and OK.

[toadisland]

An afterthought: and now that this is done, I WANT TO ASK: could I have just copied and transferred my "Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird" directory from one machine to the other? I did this successfully with my (Corel) WordPerfect "profile", (delete and replace).

[DanRaisch]

With an added step, yes, you could. You would need to edit the file profiles.ini to point to the correct location, including the new WinUserID and the correct profile name.

[Rayleigh458]

this is a point where Thunderbird beats its competitors. You can just copy the .default file and move it to any system. In fact, I tested it for moving from Windows to MacOS. Thunderbird in Mac easily imported emails from the extracted file that contained profile from Thunderbird Windows. All the emails were in the right place.
Outlook is too bad at this. You just can't move the identities among the OS platforms. especially from Mac to Windows.

[toadisland]

Yes. I did it, just the xx.default file/directory, and, like you say, everything's the same in machine 2.