Hi, I've got a dual boot (Fedora Core 3/XP) machine running and for the past couple of years have used Linux for 95% of all of my needs. I've recently found the need to spend more time in XP working with some new software. However, what's bugging me is that all of my email is in Thunderbird on the Linux partition and I'd now like to be able to access it in XP too.

I've read the tuturials on setting up Thunderbird on a dual boot machine but they all seem to assume that you create a profile in XP first then subsequently set things up in Linux. Furthermore, they all seem to start from the position of a fresh install and don't consider the case where the user already has a couple of years of email in place.

I would appreciate any guidance that you could provide regarding making an existing Linux Thunderbird profile available to XP.

Cheers!

PS. Please no 'solutions' involving finding software on Linux to replace the Windows app that I'm using as its a personal preference thing...

HE

First of all, let me sure I understand your situation.
You currently have both XP and Fedora on one single computer (separate partitions).
Your emails live in Thunderbird in Fedora.
You want your emails to also live in Thunderbird in XP.

Well, there's an easy way and a hard way.
Honestly, I don't even know if the hard way can be done--it's just theory.
In theory, you could edit some config file in Thunderbird (userprefs.js or something?) to store application data in a place different from the default place. You'd have to have a shared FAT32 partition that both versions of Thunderbird would point to.

I don't vouch for this working, but that's the only way to do it... the hard way.

The easy way is to make sure you have enough room on your email server and using IMAP to check email instead of POP3. That way, the messages aren't stored on your hard drive but on the server. That's how I do it. That way I can check the same email account and have the same messages, whether I'm accessing the account from work or home, XP or Linux.

Don't know about the easy way as suggested by aysiu, have to trust him on that,

but i use the hard way myself, which i think is not that hard, provided you have some partition space left formated as FAT32 big enough to have your email folders on.
If you have, just copy the localfolders "/thunderbird/mail/localfolders/ to your shared fat32 partition.
then you open thunderbird click on "tools" "account settings" there you see the path that leads to your local mail folders and you have to tell it where to look.

hope it might be usefull.

You'll have to move it to your XP partition. Set it up as a FAT32 so that Linux can read it. Your data files should be in "C:\Documents and Settings\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default". Make sure you check prefs.js, because some of the paths in there are Linux-specific, and you'll want to change them to the Windows path.

Symlink selected files from ~/.thunderbird to the Windows Application Data folder. You might not want to symlink prefs.js for the reason I stated above (although I did as I rarely use Windows for that to be a problem). I symlinked prefs.js, abook.mab, training.dat, us, Mail, and ImapMail. There are probably other files worth symlinking too, but I've gotten by like this fine.

..This assumes that you trust FAT32 or NTFS well enough to store your email on it. I wouldn't..

-turgut

i don't trust any file system with my mail on it.

no reason to stop making back ups

Thanks folks for all of your comments. I solved the problem a couple of years back by ditching my Linux box for a nice shiny Mac