Finally tackled an interesting challenge I set for myself last night. My wife and I like to download our email from time to time. My wife was used to using Outlook Express, which isn’t a bad email client (after all– the gui and features set the standard for pretty much all other email clients), and I was using Mozilla Mail, which lacked some integration and a few features, but was excellent at doing what I needed it to do. After thunderbird really started shaping up, I switched and have been very impressed.
Eventually, Outlook Express started giving us trouble due to its integration with MSN Messenger (which we almost never use, anyway), so it was easy to convince my wife to try thunderbird. She had no problem at all migrating to the new client. So we became seperate profiles in Thunderbird.
Now we’re on the new dual-boot 64-bit machine running both Windows XP Pro and Ubuntu Linux 64 (breezy badger). Thunderbird, of course, runs in both operating systems. My challenge was to set up t-bird so that either one of us could access either of our profiles from either login profile on either OS without having to synchronize multiple profile locations.
So now we come to it– How to set up multiple T-bird accounts, imported from previous existing profiles, available over multiple operation systems (dual-boot). I accomplished this by setting up our mail profiles in a seperate mounted partition (/home) which we both had r/w rights on. Then I manually wrote the profile locations into the thunderbird config file (profiles.ini in the .mozilla-thunderbird directory). I then moved the old address books (abook.mab) and “Mail” folders from the profiles on the old computer to the profile folders on the new computer. This didn’t, however, make the old settings and mail magically show up. I had to set up mail under each profile as if I were starting from scratch, so I moved the abook.mab addy books and “Mail” folders with all our old email in them to a safe directory (Mail.old) and re-created the mail accounts from scratch using the same config, email addys and server settings from the previous setup. After that, I renamed the newly-populated Mail folder Mail.bak and renamed the Mail.old folder to Mail. Now all the old email showed up in the old folders just like on the previous config. Replacing abook.mab worked after this, as well.
I then tested the settings by getting into my mail profile under the other ubuntu profiles successfully, being able to change settings or download new email as either user. When I booted into Windows, everything still worked magically. I was able to peform all tasks in my mail profile with updates showing up in either OS under any profile.
If you were wondering how to migrate Thunderbird to Thunderbird, tweaking for multiple profiles, multiple OS’s, or a combination thereof– This is one way to do it successfully!
