Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

where are message filters saved

  • 1 reply
  • 1 has this problem
  • 5 views
  • Last reply by Norio

more options

I'm setting up thunderbird on a new computer. Messages were automatically migrated. I need to find my message filters and address book files so I can link them with Thunderbird on the new computer.

I'm setting up thunderbird on a new computer. Messages were automatically migrated. I need to find my message filters and address book files so I can link them with Thunderbird on the new computer.

All Replies (1)

more options

Hi UVMJulie, The easiest thing to do would be to run Mozbackup on your old computer and back up your default Thunderbird profile, then copy the resultant archive to your new computer and run Mozbackup there to restore the profile.

The address book files and the message filters are located under c:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\<########.default\.

The message filters are contained in a text file, msgFilterRules.dat, while the address books are in *.mab files. Your personal address book is called abook.mab while the collected addresses address book is called history.mab. There may be multiple files in a set of mab, e.g., abook.mab, abook-1.mab, etc. There may also be multiple sub-directories with the files you need depending on whether you set up additional accounts, or have an IMAP account. You may want to look at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder for a description of the various important files in your profile.

But, as I said, the easiest path is to use Mozbackup (http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/). It's free and effective.

Hope this helps, Norio