How to Transfer Thunderbird Settings and Email on a Mac

Thunderbird is a free, stable and secure email program with advanced spam filtering developed by the same people who released the Firefox web browser. While it's a popular program, it does lack the ability to move your accounts to a new computer easily. Facing an operating system upgrade? Or perhaps you need to move all your programs to a new computer. This article will show you exactly how to move your Thunderbird email settings and mail to a new environment.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Apple Macintosh Computer running Mac OS X (the "new" and the "old")
• Thunderbird
• Any type of removable storage (USB Thumb Drive, CD-R, Flash/SD/etc.), crossover cable or a good home network for transfer

1. Launch Thunderbird on the "old" Mac.

2. Empty your Trash and Junk folders for each of your email accounts. This will make moving your settings a little faster.

3. Close Thunderbird.

4. 

   Locate your Default Thunderbird Profile folder named "XXXXXX.default" where the X's are a random mix of numbers and letters. On a Mac running OS X it's located in your Home folder (or if you have multiple users on your Mac, your user account's folder) > Library > Thunderbird > Profiles.
   
   Since it's possible to use multiple profiles on one installation of Thunderbird, you may have more than one.

5. 

   Copy all the files in the Default folder to your removable storage or a spot on the network, or directly to the new computer over the network. You can also choose to create a zip file and then move the one zip file. Compress the folders in the Default folder by selecting all the items in the folder, right-clicking and selecting "Create Archive of x Items" or "Compress x Items" (depending on which version of OS X you're running).

6. Start up the "new" Mac running Mac OS X and download, install & launch Thunderbird. By launching Thunderbird, the program will create a new Default Profile in Home > Library > Thunderbird > Profiles.

7. Shut down Thunderbird.

8. Move (and unzip if you've made an archive) the contents of the Default folder from the "old" Mac to the "new" Mac's Default Profile for Thunderbird.
   
   
   
   Again, the Default Profile folder is located in Home > Library > Thunderbird > Profiles and is named "XXXXXXX.default" where the X's stand for random characters.

9. Relaunch Thunderbird--your old settings and email are ready for use in this new installation.

Resources

• Download Mozilla Thunderbird

[magicbrook]

on 9/12/2009 Nothing that I have ever read, through windows to windows, windows to mac, mac to mac has ever worked. I just tried this, making sure that all permissions were correct at the OS level, and NO Thunderbird does NOT see my mail folders.

My empirical evidence suggests that the transfer must be done this way:

-- recreate all the accounts (I have many! and maybe that's the diff? this assumes but one email account?)
-- move only the mail folders, not the index folders (and all the ancillary thunderbird folders for various settings)
-- compact all folders - wait while thunderbird redoes all the indexes.

UGH! there has to be a way to just get thunderbird to read in the old data. But I have NEVER found it

[gerdc]

on 4/25/2009 This doesn't work with the current Thunderbird.The inbox doen't work, after about... nothing happens any more. The settings don't work.Gerd