I'm having a great deal of difficulty moving my mozilla mail data (mailbox, subdirectories and their contents) from Mozilla 1.3 on one (linux) machine to Mozilla 1.4 on another (linux,also). I can get the mailbox and subdirectory structure moved, but the contents get lost. Has anyone seen/solved this problem?

Thanks.

By 'contents lost' do you mean that the mail data didn't get copied?

Check also that you have copied everything you need (including hidden files - preceded by a dot) and that you haven't changed any of the file permissions.

I had the same problem - but I cheated and just did a chmod -R 700 /home/ammullan/.mozilla/default/69lz4rny.slt/pop3.server.co.nz

Works fine cos it seems to be a diectory access problem (can't remember what permission is needed to access a directory so 700 worked for me)...

I'm wondering if you tried taring the whole .mozilla directory then untarring it on the new machine.

From your home directory type the following:
tar -cf moz.tar .mozilla/*

This will create one file with all your mozilla settings.

Make sure you created a user account on the new machine with the same name on the new computer.
Then connect to your new machine with an ftp program. I use sftp:
sftp <newmachine_name_or_ip_address>
Enter password:

Then type:
ftp> put moz.tar

Then type:
quit

On the new machine install mozilla, open up a browser then close it .
then type:
mv .mozilla .mozilla.default

then type:
tar xvf moz.tar

This should leave you with a .mozilla directory with all the same data/settings as the old machine.

I haven't tried this yet but am planning on doing it soon.
The worst that can happen is wiping out default mozilla settings. If it dosen't work just type:
rm -rf .mozilla
mv .mozilla.default .mozilla

Good Luck,
Jeem

I've had no luck getting things to work properly. My mail folders transfer but the individual emails to not. Copying the .mozilla directory from one machine to another definitely does not work for me. The files I have transferred are:

/home/user/.mozilla/*.slt/Mail/"pop.cox-internet.com/"

which is an individual mail acount under /*.slt/Mail/. Yours will vary. It supposedly has all the user-specific info for a given mail account comprised of your folder structure and the saved e-mails in each folder.

The *.slt directory appears to be unique for each installation of Mozilla. So copying the entire .mozilla directory and subs blows everything up.

The abook.mab file in the *.slt directory is supposedly the collected e-mail address file has not been readable from one machine to another

The bookmarks.html file in the *.slt directory which contains your customized bookmarks for the browser, does transfer successfully.

I hope we can get this figured out. It seems really weird that Mozilla.org hasn't a way to easily transfer your data from one installation to another.

Have you had a look at the permissions on the files in question? (ie: are you the owner and group member of the files?)

Yes, done that. But maybe we should back up a bit. To have a successful transfer of my Mozilla settings from one computer to another (including browser bookmarks, mail address books (plural), mail folders (and their contents)) what files do I need to transfer? I've been trying to transfer the the data with these files:

/home/user/.mozilla/.slt/Mail/mail_account_directory

/home/user/.mozilla/.slt/bookmarks.html

/home/user/.mozilla/.slt/abook.mab

/home/user/.mozilla/.slt/history.mab

When I try to open the email client I get this message:

One of your address book files, history.mab could not be read it will be copied to a backup file and a new history.mab will be created.

I've checked the permissions and user names and they are the same on both machines so I must be missing some critical files in the transfer, but what are they?