Moving Thunderbird from Windows to MacOS

May 1, 2007 3:43 PM

So I am in the process of switching lots of applications over from PC to Mac, and next up is Thunderbird for my email. I'd like to bring several years worth of email with me, but I can't find a guide on doing this. Anybody got any suggestions?

I'm also wondering if there is a way I could keep using both versions on the same mail folders; I am running on a MacBook Pro using BootCamp/Parallels, so the Mac side has access to the PC's files (on a separate partition). Has anyone done this?

posted by baggers to computers & internet (9 comments total)

I have done it before, it is a question of copying some files and folders from one computer to the other, look at Migrating settings to a new profile and Moving your profile to another computer.

The second question, I have not tried before.
posted by Dataphage at 4:14 PM on May 1, 2007

I've dual booted Windows and Linux and had them share a single profile/mailbox. It's not extraordinarily difficult. Here are some of the many links that may help:
http://learn.clemsonlinux.org/wiki/Email:Sharing_your_Thunderbird_profile
http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/firefox-thunderbird.shtml

Plenty more if you google something like "Thunderbird windows dual boot share profile"
posted by chrisamiller at 5:14 PM on May 1, 2007

I've done it for somebody else on a dual boot Windows 98 / Ubuntu Linux setup. It works fine. All you need to do is start up Thunderbird's profile manager in the new environment, tell it to create a new profile, browse to the profile folder from the old environment, and use that as your new default profile.
posted by flabdablet at 6:21 PM on May 1, 2007

Thunderbird is even smart enough not to let two instances of itself use the same profile at the same time and munge things up, if you end up running Windows in a VM; whichever one starts first writes a lock file to the profile, and trying to use the same profile from a second instance results in a polite refusal to start, even if the two instances are not running in the same (real or virtual) machine. It's all good.
posted by flabdablet at 6:24 PM on May 1, 2007

Thanks for the answers so far. I've tried doing what the links thatchrisamiller provided suggested, and created a new profile that points to the windows disk. However, whenever I start up thunderbird, it says that there is another copy of thunderbird running, and refuses to start. There is no other copy running, and I can't find a .parentlock file to delete and unlock the profile.
posted by baggers at 7:24 PM on May 1, 2007

This is typical behaviour for Thunderbird trying to work with a nonexistent profile folder; the path you put into profiles.ini has to be exactly right. Starting the Thunderbird profile manager in Mac-land and using it to browse your way to your existing Windows Thunderbird profile is more reliable.
posted by flabdablet at 8:36 PM on May 1, 2007

Although this may be overkill for your current predicament, just in case you ever find yourself doing something like this in the future, and want to totally free yourself from dependence on any one mail program, I totally recommend setting up your own IMAP server, just for yourself. (You can run it on your main machine but it's way better if you put it on a spare box or something.)

Any mail program that can talk IMAP can connect to it (from within your LAN, I wouldn't expose it to the Internet unless you know what you're doing) and you can copy messages up to it for archival, with all your folder hierarchy, and either just store them there or copy them down to any other program that talks IMAP. It also takes your emails off of your local machine, and makes them pretty easy to back up.

To be honest I can't believe that someone hasn't made a home-NAS appliance that does this, because I don't know how I'd live without it; it makes working from multiple computers a breeze, too.

Anyway, just food for thought.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:04 PM on May 1, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

If you move from Thunderbird to Mail, make sure that you compress your folders before doing it. That one caught me out big time.
posted by seanyboy at 12:35 AM on May 2, 2007

As for keeping both versions accessible to different mail clients, then an easy way would be to store your email offline in IMAP folders. Again, this is how I do it. FYI, I use fastmail for my offline mail storage.
posted by seanyboy at 12:37 AM on May 2, 2007