Migrating Mozilla Thunderbird from Linux to OS X

Apparently I’m in the minority when it comes to migrating my Thunderbird Profile from Linux to OS X. I couldn’t find information for it anywhere. Most of the information I found was how to move from another client to Thunderbird or how to migrate from XP to Linux.

What I’ve tried

  1. I copied over the entire profile, and added it to the Profiles directory under /Users/[username]/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles. After that, I modified the pref.js for this profile changing all references to /home/[username]/.mozilla-thunderbird/ to /Users/[username]/Library/Thunderbird/. With all of this done, the only thing that appears in Thunderbird when I launch it is Local Folders. There is no sign of my emails. When I look under the mail settings, the mailbox appears to be setup, but nothing shows up in the Inbox.

  2. Another thing I tried was using default profile as created by Thunderbird, then overwriting the Profile Mail files over the existing and still nothing shows. This method doesn’t require any change to the prefs.js file as it should already be correct and more environmentally accurate.

GOOD NEWS!! The second method is what proved to be the answer, although, one key thing for my situation was the speedbump pothole in the road. I keep my Inbox as a global Inbox, meaning all of my mail for my email account gets stored in Local Folders’ Inbox rather than the mail.whatever.com Inbox. This means I was copying the wrong Mail folder into the Mac profile. What I did to find this was a simple du -sh on the Mail directory to find that my Local Folders directory was 1.4GB while my mail.whatever.com was only 100MB (which is still a lot for no use, but no worries… I don’t need it). Once the correct Mail dir was put in place, Thunderbird was launched and had all of my email and folder structure was intact.

Note: I spent about an hour looking for the answer and submitted a post to the mozillazine forums. I must commend the Moderators over there because they are on top of their game. They replied to my post in about 5 minutes and provided another workaround that would’ve worked (I tested it) had I not found out my own goof up during the process.

06/05/2006 | Linux, Mac | Comments

One Response to “Migrating Mozilla Thunderbird from Linux to OS X”

  1. Posted by: podious - 06/05/2006

    Congratulations! You used STRIKETHROUGH!!! ;-)

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