moving mail
 

I am using Fedora 8, Mozilla Firefox 5.0 and Thunderbird mail 2.0.0.19.
My Home Directory is on a separate partition from my root files. I and going to remove Fedora 8 and install Fedora 10. In the past when I have done a complete install I have lost date. I do not want to lose my e-mail files, I have save a lot of important e-mails that I need to access. I copy and paste the mail folder to my laptop, but only the address book was there, no saved e-mails. I try importing and the same thing. Are the saved e-mails in a different location or is there a way to move them completely to a back up drive?

One way to see where your mail is stored is by looking with Thunderbird. In the panel on the left, right click on the account. I have 4 accounts and also Local Folders where mail is located. My Local Folders is in a completely different place because I set it up that way.

So, right click on the account and choose properties. Look at the Server Settings section. At the bottom it tells what folder the mail is in. Most of it should be in ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/some-special-profile/Mail. For the Local Folders you will also see a listing of where that is.

If all your mail, including the local folders is in the profile folder, then you can keep that entire folder. It contains other things as well, like the address book.

Whenever I put old folders like this into a new home, I always do it with copy and keep the backup. You do want to be sure that Thunderbird is closed when you copy things over.

On a default Thunderbird installation your mail goes into ~/.thunderbird - by making a backup of that directory you can restore it anytime.

If your /home directory is on a different partition anyway, then you only need to make sure that the /home partition is NOT formatted when installing FC10. When doing an upgrade, rather then a clean install, then your /home directory should remain instant. But in case of an upgrade I'd rather advise to do an FC9 upgrade first, before upgrading to FC10. This is a safer route for cases when applications and configuration concept change over time - subsequent FC version are usually more compatible.

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