The most important thing to me in office are my emails, I need to keep years of records. So while shifting to another Linux machine has never been a problem to me, I encountered it when I decided to shift to an Mac for my main machine in the office.
My original plan was to copy the .thunderbird file from my old hard-disk to the mac as I have been doing over the years. However, I was totally taken aback when realized that there was no apparent way to view hidden files in the Finder.
A quick search on google gave me a fast solution: a small shell command to execute “defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES” Restarted Finder (hold down Option key, click and hold on Finder icon in the Dock- contextual menu appears, select Relaunch) – that was easy!!
Time to locate the .thunderbird on mac and replace it with the one I had. Looked at all the places, nope, no .thunderbird file on the mac system . Taking a chance I crossed my fingers and did the following:
1) Open Thunderbird, create a profile.
2) Quit Thunderbird
3) This created a folder under Library->Thunderbird->Profiles. The Profiles folder had a .default folder.
4) I renamed the .default folder to .default.original
5) Copied the .default folder from my old .thunderbird under Library->Thunderbird->Profiles
6) Renamed the copied.default with the name of the original
7) Started Thunderbird
And Voila!! it worked. I had all my old emails, folders, filters… everything working as it was on my linux machine.
I later went back to Library->Thunderbird->Profiles and deleted the .default.original folder.
If you don’t create the default Profile but just copy it over, doesn’t it work ?
No it does not.
Annoying. And you’d think that software would behave across OS platforms. Thank you for writing this up. Would help me if someone comes in need of this.
TB3 contains Import wizard. I think it worked while I was using some ancient beta version on TB3 long time back while using Mac as my work machine..
Works cross platform?
Thanks a lot of writing this post. Helped me a lot especially in locating the Profile folder 🙂
You got a definitely helpful blog I’ve been right here reading for about an hour. I’m a newbie and your accomplishment is quite a lot an inspiration for me.