My wife has decided to give linux a try. I've installed Mint Linux 10 for her.

Last week (bad timing) I converted her to Thunderbird. Now I have the task of moving all her mail folders and account settings from Thunderbird under Windows 7 to Thunderbird under linux.

Other postings say all I have to do is copy the Windows profile directory to her home directory and rename it .thunderbird.

Doesn't work. When I start Thunderbird all it displays is a window for new account details.

I tried just copying the <gibberish>.default directory across and renaming it to the one that was there. Again, no luck.

Before it started using sqlite things were simple!
I backed up with MozBackup, and then noticed that it only works with Windows.

How do I migrate?

TIA
Jim

As others have told you you DO just have to move the profile directory, but you also need to make sure that Thunderbird is told to use that new directory with the profiles.ini file.

Copy the "Thunderbird" directory from Windows (that contains a at least a dir called profiles and a file called profiles.ini) to her home directory and rename it ".thunderbird". Then open profiles.ini and make sure that you have the correct path to the profile directory (the gibberish.default dir) whether absolute or relative.

So long as you get everything right, it will work. If any little thing isn't quite right, Thunderbird will start a new profile from scratch. That can, however, be beneficial as it gives you a correct template for profiles.ini relative to the profile storage location which you can then check against to see why you haven't got it right.

Thanks.

To make life easier for me, I kept the original disk for recovery purposes, and copied the entire C: drive to a partition on the new disk. I used locate to find the profiles directory, and found 2 copies. A useless one in /users/xxxx/AppData and the right one in .../AppData/Roaming.

I was trying to use the wrong one. All is well now. For a few minutes anyway...