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Installed Thunderbird on New drive but can't transfer emails and address books drom old drive to new PC.

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reedd334
reedd334
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I have a computer I built that my dad who uses Thunderbird for his email. We had to remove the C: drive, which was a SSD drive because it was running out of space and replaced it with a Western Digital Veloci-Raptor 500GB drive. I am not familiar with Thunderbird and did not export his emails or address book before I switched the drives. I have set his new Thunderbird account to keep the mails on the server and not the PC. How can I get the old emails and address books from the old hard drive. I did copy the Thunderbird folder from the C: drive and the folder on the E: drive that Thunderbird was installed to. I have read many forums on how to move emails and address books to or from Thunderbird but non are like my situation. Hoe can retrieve the emails and address books from the previous install and transfer them over to the new PC once I have done a reinstall?

I have a computer I built that my dad who uses Thunderbird for his email. We had to remove the C: drive, which was a SSD drive because it was running out of space and replaced it with a Western Digital Veloci-Raptor 500GB drive. I am not familiar with Thunderbird and did not export his emails or address book before I switched the drives. I have set his new Thunderbird account to keep the mails on the server and not the PC. How can I get the old emails and address books from the old hard drive. I did copy the Thunderbird folder from the C: drive and the folder on the E: drive that Thunderbird was installed to. I have read many forums on how to move emails and address books to or from Thunderbird but non are like my situation. Hoe can retrieve the emails and address books from the previous install and transfer them over to the new PC once I have done a reinstall?

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Matt
Matt
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first the old drive... the location varied between windows versions but it is either in Application data or appdata. In vista and above open the roaming folder. Both are hidden folders so you need to show hidden files and folders in Windows. Within that you will find a Thunderbird folder.

The sub folders of that are the profiles, but simply copying the Thunderbird folder over it's like in the appdata\roaming of Vista and above will replace the existing with the old.

Copy the actual profile in the folder called profile XXXX.default xxxx being a random string will place two profiles on the hard disk which can be opened individually using the profile manager. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_manager

Finally individual folders of mail can be moved using the import export tools. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/ You just need to locate the data. Folders are a file with no extension and another with the same name and an MSF extension. They are in sub folders of mail in the profile.

Address books. see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_address_books_between_profiles