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Move to new install only the email and password ?

  • 5 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 6 views
  • Last reply by Zenos

patrocle
patrocle
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I had thunderbird installed on the old machine and i have a full backup from drive c: , but now on the new machine i want to transfer only the email and password. how to do that?

Thanks

I had thunderbird installed on the old machine and i have a full backup from drive c: , but now on the new machine i want to transfer only the email and password. how to do that? Thanks

All Replies (5)

Zenos
Zenos
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I suggest you copy the old Thunderbird profile over to the new machine.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-tb

patrocle
patrocle Question owner
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I see what you saying! but in the profile ,what folder and files should i copy over ,so i move only the email and password? that's all, no other data! all the emails i want to move i want them empty, as the old profile i have about 15gb and was running really slow, so i decided to move email and pass , but with none of the incoming or sent data.

Thanks.

Zenos
Zenos
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I started by writing that I didn't know what you meant by "i want to transfer only the email and password", but that got lost when I went off to another page to look up the profiles article.

People use the word "email" very loosely and it could mean any or all of email address, email account, email server, email message, or email client.

So, in this statement: "i decided to move email and pass", I take it "email" means your account settings?

If you don't need that 15 GB of data why not just delete it from inside Thunderbird? Might be much easier than trying to dissect your profile. ;-)

I'd copy the profile, then delete the Mail and ImapMail folders from the copy, and try with that. I'd hope and expect it to recreate the missing folders. Note that your profile will be hidden by default so you'll need to enable viewing of hidden files and folders.

It's not a big profile that slows Thunderbird so much as having a few very large folders. Splitting a large folder into a few smaller folders can help enormously, and that's the main point and advantage of the Archive folders; old data is moved from current folders into additional folders, spreading the load.

patrocle
patrocle Question owner
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Thank you for replying!

"delete the Mail and ImapMail folders"

so if i delete the folders from "mail" and "imapmail" will that still have the email and password within the thunderbird when i open the program?

As i see there are quite few folders in there! i have over 20 gmail accounts in it.

Zenos
Zenos
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It works for me.

Bear in mind it won't help much with IMAP accounts; they'll just download everything again.