Importing Mail folder from one Thunderbird to another Thunderbird.

Robert L Cochran cochranb at speakeasy.net
Mon Jun 29 00:42:26 UTC 2009


I travel a lot and need to get my email on the road. I don't like using 
webmail even though my ISP offers it. I like to download my emails and 
tuck them away in a long list of mail folders. Until recently going on 
travel meant borrowing my wife's laptop. I'd run Fedora by booting off 
an external USB drive. But my Thunderbird stuff was on my desktop 
machine. Well I would simply tar up the ~/.thunderbird directory on my 
desktop like so:

tar -cvzf thunderbird_2009-01-01_v1.tar.gz .thunderbird

then move it via scp to the laptop. Then I would untar it:

tar -xvzf thunderbird_2009-01-01_v1.tar.gz

While this worked it did create some issues because the laptop was 32 
bit and the desktop machine was x86_64 and for me this primarily 
affected Thunderbird's plugins like enigmail. So I took to using

tar -cvzf thunderbird_2009-01-01_v1.tar.gz 
.thunderbird/[my-salted-dir]/Mail/[my-mail-folders]

where my-salted-dir is the salted directory name and my-mail-folders is 
the mail directory of interest.

This has worked better, but ignores the preference settings that might 
be in the file prefs.js. So keep that in mind. I'm sure more experienced 
people here will point out other issues with this method too.

But I've been doing this for a long, long time and feeling no pain at 
all except for issues with enigmail. When I return from the trip I 
simply tar up the mail folders which are on the laptop and scp them to 
the desktop and untar them. Voila, I have a reasonably up-to-date set of 
mail folders on two computers. If one crashes I can still pull my email 
off the other machine and feel little loss. Saving old emails is really 
important.

Bob




On 06/27/2009 09:08 PM, Jim wrote:
> FC11/KDE
>
> FC8 > FC11 thunderbird "Mail" folder.
> How do I import the old Thunderbird "Mail" Folder from FC8, into FC11, 
> Thunderbird ?
>




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