Importing Address Book and Messages

[w2imo]

I am really getting dense in my old age. I have read how to transfer data from old address book and getting old messages but it doesn't sink in.
Here is my situation:
Upgraded to Windows 7 on new hard drive.
Loaded Thunderbird on new hard drive.
Need to get address book and messages from old hard drive (now drive F in PC) and move to new hard drive (drive C).
Step by step instructions for this simple minded would really help.

[Dartman]

I'll move you to Thunderbird Support.

[DanRaisch]

Locate the old Profile. Copy the file abook.mab from that old profile to the new profile, replacing the file with the same name in that location.

[roparr2]

To copy the mail, copy the folder called Mail.

[w2imo]

Success! I finally worked up the courage to export the old address book and message folders from the old hard drive to a temp folder on the new hard drive. I then imported the files to the new and found that they do not replace 2 weeks worth of collected e-mail.

If you are wondering, In order to export from the old drive, I have to manually unplug the new drive to make the old drive bootable again. Then I can run Thunderbird and do the exporting stuff. I then re-plug in the new drive, making it the bootable drive. I start up Thunderbird and import from the temp file. I probably went about this the hard way, but didn't know of any other way to start the old drive Thunderbird program.

[DanRaisch]

Well, you didn't really need to use Thunderbird at all. If the importing you did used the ImportExport Tools extension it would import mbox files. You could also have renamed the old message files (to avoid having them replace the new ones) and just copied them into the new profile's Mail folder. Thunderbird on the new system would have displayed folders with the names of the renamed files.

[w2imo]

That sounds fine to me, but I didn't know how to export the files from the old drive with not having Thunderbird running. I am sure there is a way explained in the pages of research I have looked at for the past 2 weeks, but it still didn't sink in. Thanks for your comments Dan..... Ken, Rochester, NY

[DanRaisch]

You're welcome. As long as things are working properly, that's what counts.

[xia-is-me]

If you now have Windows 7 and didn't know it did not come with Outlook, but you saved your address book, it is fairly easy to export them to Thunderbird
1 In your address book folder, click edit/ select all / copy to folder / name this folder "contacts"
2 Open "Contacts" and click "export"; choose CSV (Comma Separated Values); click Export and choose a location (desktop is good); name it "address book"; it will become an Excel CSV file
3 In Thundebird / address book / tools / Import / address books / next / Text file, ... / next / to locate file, change the type of file from "LDIF" to "Comma separated"

Be sure that the headings on the Excel CSV file match the options in the address book; move categories up and down and remove if they are not included in your excel file

This worked really well for me so I hope it is helpful to some of you.