Moving Thunderbird mails from Linux to Mac

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.

7 thoughts on “Moving Thunderbird mails from Linux to Mac”

  1. 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.

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