Hello, I am experiencing a lot of difficulties restoring my mail into another thunderbird on another machine.

I am following the instructions given here but it must have to do with thunderbird versions.

http://email.about.com/od/mozillathu...ackup_prof.htm

I am backing up the contents of the hidden thunderbird folder of the source machine

then i create another profile from console using

thunderbird -profile

on the destination machine I open the thunderbird folder remove it's contents and replace them with my backup files.

When I run thunderbird it takes me through the usual wizard as if new user. No back up files or emails appear.

The thunderbird being backed up is using thunderbird 2.0.0.14
the thunderbird the files are being restored to is using version 2.0.0.18

Does this make a difference?

Does the user account on the destination machine have the same UID as the user account on the source machine? If not then you may need to run chown to change the file ownership on the destination machine.
Log on as root or su in a terminal to the root account.
If the user account on the destination machine is named user01 has their home directory at /home/user01 then the following code would change the file ownership of the transferred files to that of the user account on the destination machine.
This problem and others can be diagnosed by logging in as the normal user, opening a terminal window, and running Thunderbird from the command line. Error messages will appear in the terminal.