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Is there a way to save my current Thunderbird configuration before making changes?

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  • Last reply by david

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I’ve been using Thunderbird for many years, but only for one Gmail account. Within the past few days, Microsoft made some changes to Outlook Live, and it is preventing me from seeing new e-mails in my Hotmail account (among other defects). So I want to try accessing Hotmail through Thunderbird, which I believe is possible (correct me if I’m wrong). But I’m afraid of screwing up my stable Thunderbird configuration and introducing problems in accessing my Gmail account. Is there a way to save the current configuration, and then revert back to it if I do indeed mess things up when trying to add Hotmail? (By the way, I do have access to those Hotmail e-mails on my phone and tablet, where I use Bluemail.)

I’ve been using Thunderbird for many years, but only for one Gmail account. Within the past few days, Microsoft made some changes to Outlook Live, and it is preventing me from seeing new e-mails in my Hotmail account (among other defects). So I want to try accessing Hotmail through Thunderbird, which I believe is possible (correct me if I’m wrong). But I’m afraid of screwing up my stable Thunderbird configuration and introducing problems in accessing my Gmail account. Is there a way to save the current configuration, and then revert back to it if I do indeed mess things up when trying to add Hotmail? (By the way, I do have access to those Hotmail e-mails on my phone and tablet, where I use Bluemail.)

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Yes, you can create an additional profile. A profile contains email accounts and all other settings that Thunderbird uses. You can have any number of profiles and can switch between them as desired. To create a new profile, click help>moretroubleshootinginformation, scroll down to Profiles, click 'about:profiles, then click 'create profiles' button, then next, then enter a name for the profile, e.g., hotmail, then click Finish. With that you will be in a new profile and can create your hotmail account.

Having written the above, you would generally be safe to add the hotmail account to existing profile, as Thunderbird keeps all accounts separate. For your protection, you could create a backup of the profile , either with tools>export (if your profile is smaller than 2 gig), or with the importexport addon.