Moving Thunderbird Profile from one computer to another - SOLVED

[Falcon]

Fehlix and others....

Sorry for the late reply, but I haven't had a chance to try out your suggestions until now. Everything now works as you described. Funny how easy things are when you know what to do (LOL). I appreciate all of you taking the time to address by problem and respond to my posts. It is much appreciated...!!!

[manyroads]

Fehlix and others....

Sorry for the late reply, but I haven't had a chance to try out your suggestions until now. Everything now works as you described. Funny how easy things are when you know what to do (LOL). I appreciate all of you taking the time to address by problem and respond to my posts. It is much appreciated...!!!

Just for another perspective, I use Dropbox (any cloud server would do).

I create a symlink to the thunderbird folder which I have moved to Dropbox and then access it from anywhere. All I need is the same symlink on each machine.

[Falcon]

ManyRoads,

I usually only read my emails on my computers at home, but your idea is worth considering.

[tascoast]

I believe the simplest strategy is to use root Thunar, set to show hidden files, locate your Thunderbird profile (user/.thunderbird), copy (backing up elsewhere initially for reference) and paste into new install (ie. having deleted default profile in new install first).

This means Thunderbird will then see your profile folder as the default when run.

I think it is as simple as that, having done this a few times as I migrate Thunderbird between MX releases on different partitions.

In practice I can just copy and paste between MX partitions once I have installed a new MX version, but I always archive the old Thunderbird profile on a data partition and externally. A personal snapshot is another way to 'archive' Thunderbird mail folders and settings for later access.

[Falcon]

Tascoast,

What you described is basically what I did and it worked well.

[manyroads]

and to close the loop... if you move your hidden thunderbird directory to a cloud directory, create a symlink, move the symlink to your home dir and then rename the symlink to".thunderbird" in your home directory, you have what I suggested and it is accessible from any machine you run. Voila!

[Falcon]

I think that the last hurdle that I have to overcome in completing the migration of Thunderbird to my MX Linux OS is to adjust the font sizes for the program. On the larger display that I'm using on the desktop computer, the screen that shows the list of messages that have been downloaded displays in text that is too small. Thunderbird supposedly has add-ons for this, but one will not work on versions below 58, and the other one installs but does not work, as attested to by many people who tried to use it.

Has anyone else found a method or program that can be used to change the text size used in Thunderbird? I'm using the version of Thunderbird that came preinstalled with MX Linux 18, which is 52.9.1.

Thanks in advance.

[JayM]

Thunderbird supposedly has add-ons for this, but one will not work on versions below 58

Thunderbird 2.60.6.1 is in the MX Test repo as an upgrade, which I think would be version 60.

[Falcon]

Jay,

Thanks for the information. I took your advice and installed Thunderbird from the MX Test Repo and it worked fine. Then I installed the Theme and Font Size Changer and it works as advertised. One more hurdle cleared!

[Falcon]

I'm not sure if I should post this here, or if I should start a new thread, but here goes.

I installed MX Linux 18 on my laptop and started using Thunderbird for email. I created three email accounts: One Primary account and one sub-account and I also created a sub-account for my wife on her MX user account. Once I got it to the way I liked it, I made a Live-USB stick so that I could use it to convert my desktop computer to MX. I booted from the USB on my desktop and everything looked good except that the text on the main Thunderbird window was kind of small. It was even smaller on my wife's user account.

I found out that there is an add-on called "Font Size & Text Changer" but it would only work on T-Bird 60 or higher and the version of T-Bird in the MX Linux distro is 52.9.1. I upgraded to the version in the MX Test repo which is 60.6.1 and then installed the text size add-on and was able to increase the text size.

On my wife's user account, she can send and receive e-mail without any problem. However, on my user account I can't do either of these on either one of the two email accounts that are on my T-Bird. When the program starts, it asks me for the password for each of the two accounts, and when I enter them and check the "save password in the password manager" nothing happens. If I click the "Get Messages" button, it asks me for the passwords again and after entering them, nothing happens again. I don't get any kind of error message back from the ISP telling me that the password is incorrect so it almost seems like the portion of the program that interfaces with the ISP is not working.

The strange thing is that I have version 60.7.0 installed on my Windows 7 desktop computer and it works fine. I checked the email account settings on the desktop computer and compared them to the settings on the laptop and they are identical.

Has anybody ever run into a situation like this before or are there any suggestions on how to fix this?