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Moving Thunderbird to a new computer
- After messing with it for about 8 hours I got it resolved*** I'm moving thunderbird to a new computer. So far I've created a new profile on a the new computer's G: drive and the program is also installed in a different folder on the G: Drive. (I'm planning to have two copies of Thunderbird on the computer). The other copy for different mailboxes will be on the C: Drive. I copied the profile from the old computer to the new computer's G: Drive in a separate location. When I open Thunderbird it lists all my email accounts in the moved profile but when I go into the inboxes they are all blank. I noticed if I left click on the inbox and go to properties it's showing the inbox location as the F: drive (which is where it was on the old computer) for example mailbox:///F:/Thunderbird/Profiles/......... I don't see a way to edit the inbox location. How can I change that so it's looking for the mailboxes on the G: Drive instead of the F: Drive? The path is also a little different between the two computers. The old computer was: F:/Thunderbird/Profiles/........ and the new computer is G:/Thunderbird Data/Profiles/.........
Also I don't know if this makes any difference...On the old computer a 32 bit version of Thunderbird was running even though it is a 64 bit computer. The new computer is running the 64 bit version. They are both updated to the latest Thunderbird release.
Thanks
junkmmc দ্বারা পরিমিত
All Replies (3)
It appears you had accounts and messages separated, possibly for disk management. You can change the location of the message folders on the 'server settings' pane,
Hi David,
Thanks for the response. How would I go about combining the mailboxes into a single folder for ease in backup purposes? I have 5 email accounts on this profile, 4 of which I no longer have the account but want to keep the mail for archive purposes. The 5th account is a valid gmail account and that's the one in the separate file location. To combine them into one folder to make backup easier, do I just copy the gmail mailboxes into the other folder and then go to server settings and then browse to that location for the Local Directory of the mailbox?
I have another question I asked in a previous post that wasn't answered and maybe you can help with that too. For the 2nd installation of Thunderbird on a different hard drive for another set of mailboxes, I want to import all the data from another computer so it's working on this computer. I think I can do the same thing I did for the other mailboxes fairly easy now. There are a couple abandoned email addresses on that computer also, but the problem that comes up making me reluctant to try this, is one of my emails on the old computer has a domain address that has old emails from before I changed email servers. The new hosting company migrated all my data to the new server but somehow my account was lost from their server about a week later. The original hosting company deleted my account so they couldn't migrate the data again. Thunderbird is my only copy of those emails. The Thunderbird information on the old computer is pointing to the old mail server that doesn't exist anymore. My new mail server is using the same email address. How do I copy the old profile over and not lose the data when I create the new account that's on Microsoft Exchange since the email address is the same? I thought about renaming the old account and setting it not to retrieve messages. I don't need them combined as I only use it for looking up old information from time to time. I imagine if they were in the same account it would upload all those old emails to the new Exchange server which I don't need.
Also do you have a link to information about creating the new account for Microsoft Exchange? When I tried doing it on another computer it said my license doesn't give me access to an Exchange account. I guess they want me to have a Microsoft Outlook license. I've been using GoDaddy's webmail. I set this domain account up on an old computer as IMAP but it won't let me send any messages out from Thunderbird. It retrieves mail and syncs mail but it won't let me send. What I have is Microsoft 365 Mail from GoDaddy but I don't have a current version of Outlook to use, hence the need for Thunderbird. I have older Outlook licenses but they tell me older ones won't work.
Thanks again
Yes. To combine the gmail, exit TB, copy the profile to be within the profile at appropriate location, and then start tb, change account location (which will probably require restarting tb). For accounts that are dead, my suggestion is to copy to Local Folders and rename prior to removing the account. That protects them from any account issues. To move old accounts to be within current profile, a simple approach is to use the import-export utility to individually copy selected message folders to Local folders. My comments to this point apply to messages already local to the PC. That is, copying message files from one online account to another is its own can of worms and needs special treatment. You mentioned godaddy and exchange. We have had a number of users posting here that use thunderbird for their godaddy/office365 accounts, so I cannot advise there.