Hi,
Although the subject may sound strange, that is exactly what I am trying to do. I have just upgraded from SUSE11.0 to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. On SUSE I had thunderbird 13.0.1, the same now on Ubuntu. Still, I am having trouble transferring my old email into the new setup.
What I have done: I have an external disk with a complete backup of everything on the internal harddisk prior to installing the new OS. In Ubuntu (using gnome classic, in case that plays a role) I have started thunderbird so that it can create a new ID under which mail is kept. In there I have found the "Local folders" directory and have tried to just copy from my external backup all emails straight into that. I have copied over both the directories and the files going with them, e.g. "Software" and "Software.sbd". So far I am sure that what I am doing is (kind of...) ok, because I *can* start the new thunderbird and it will pick up the directories. It also creates new .msf files, no problem.
THE PROBLEM is that when I try to copy ALL my emails (extensive, 10 years' worth of stuff, 9 GB, don't know how many messages, but LOTS), thunderbird crashes. The way I got it to work is to back off, remove all the old emails again, then copy back in only PART of my email, leaving out whole (HUGE) directories. As I successively add more, I invariably make thunderbird crash.
Does anyone know what is going wrong and whether I might be able to do something about it? Is there a stack overflow somewhere? I have no idea how thunderbird does its file management, but this looks like a file handling error to me. The funny thing here is: The whole lot COMES from thunderbird, so I know it used to handle the volume correctly, but now it won't... I cannot find any answer to my specific problem, because most threads out there are about migrating from another mail client to thunderbird.
Thanks in advance for whatever advice anybody can give!
emdee

Hi,

I usually copy all the thunderbird profile folder (for example, sspihso0ws.default) under .thunderbird folder in your user home folder (that is, /home/username/.thunderbird/sspihso0ws.default) and edit profiles.ini configuration file (/home/username/.thunderbird/profiles.ini) to point it to the mail containing folder.

In this way, you can import not only mail archive, but mail account configurations, filters, add-ons, and so on.

I have used this method for years, from thunderbird on MS Windows XP to Mandriva 32 bits (2005 or 2006 version), then to windows again, to a VirtualBox GNU/Linux machine, an finally to Fedora 15 64 bits, and updated to Fedora 17. My mail folder is about 5 GB.

When you say TB crashes, does it show any error message? Try also calling TB from console, to see any error messages in it.

Hi TxemaM,

It seems my earlier attempt to answer failed. Nothing got posted here.

I was saying: Tried as you suggested, with the same result as before. TB crashed after about 5 s.

Yes, I get a GUI for submitting a bug report and there it gives a few terse messages, most of which I don't understand. The rest is about my software setup.

Thx,
emdee

¿Are you using Ubuntu's package? If so, try using the .tar.bz2 downloaded from mozilla instead. If it works, the problem is on Ubuntu's package.

TxemaM,

Thanks again for your advice. It took me a while to test this, but that did the trick indeed. There must be a bug in the Ubuntu Thunderbird release. The "original" from Mozilla works fine.

Not only have I been able to access ALL of my old emails now, but I have also successfully incorporated the new stuff that I had kept in directories with new names.

There is one potential downside to doing things this way, though. In case I experience problems, I will possibly have to come back to this forum to report these at a later time. On an earlier linux release (SUSE11.0) it was not a good idea to install software bypassing YaST - from that moment on I had no option but to install each new version of TB manually. Now I have bypassed the Ubuntu Software Centre, but I hope that updates to TB will still be handled correctly, because I installed the exact-same version as the software centre.

For the time being, though, I consider this problem SOLVED.

Ta,
emdee

If there's an update you should be able to go to help on the menu-bar select "About" if there's an update a button to update will be displayed, push button & let tb do it for you. That's how it was with FF.

EDDY1,
Thanks, that's what I am used to. On SUSE11 the tricky part was (for a while at least) that YaST came up with "updates" using versions that were a lot older than the newest from Mozilla I had installed manually. I *HAD* to leave automatic updates off (not that I wanted them on...) so as not to get any interference (i.e. going back to an ancient version, which I then had to override again with a manual installation). The Ubuntu Software Centre looks a lot better to me than YaST, so things should be fine (I hope).
emdee

You will only get those updates if you installed from package manager.