Need Thunderbird Mail help. Bad. Settings for data file locations?

[Guest]

Folks,

My laptop died.  It had been having hardware glitches and then despite Zonealarm it caught a really nasty bit of malware and then finally went screen-black, no boot.  I still don't know if that was hardware or if the malware wiped the firmware clean.  Either way it's toast.

There is no data loss on the 60gig hard drive thank GOD.  I've got that mounted in a little mini-chassis plugged into a desktop I just set up on Ubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake" with Openoffice and Thunderbird.  I figure this drive is infested with something WinXP will choke on so I'm basically forced to go to Linux.

I had been running Thunderbird on the XP laptop and before it died, I took every mail folder and copied their locations out to a text file which I now have access to.  The line for the inbox for example was:

mailbox:/C|/Documents and Settings/Owner/Application data/Thunderbird/Profiles/db4retjp.default/Mail/pop.prodigy.yahoo-1.com/Inbox

I have access to all that while browsing in the Ubuntu system.

So how in hell do I tell Thunderbird 1.5 series to use THAT data!?

heeelp?

Jim

[Marnoot]

There's not really a way to "import" the data (to my knowledge). What I've done in the past is when I reinstalled Thunderbird, I find the new Profiles directory in the path you mentioned, deleted the new profile "whatever.default" and replaced the whole profile directory with the one recovered from my previous installation. This retains all accounts, emails, attachments, settings, preferences, etc. I've done this several times through several windows reinstallations and it hasn't failed me yet.

So in your case, copy the whole "db4retjp.default" directory into "C|/Documents and Settings/Owner/Application data/Thunderbird/Profiles/" on your new computer/installation/whatever after installing Thunderbird. Delete the new installation's default profile first to keep it simple. If the Profiles directory structure doesn't exist yet, you may have to run Thunderbird at least once before doing this.

[Guest]

Right now my biggest problem is just finding stuff.

For example, there's a tutorial on running the "profile manager" at:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager#Linux

---
Linux

Close Firefox/Mozilla Suite/Thunderbird completely and make sure that the application is not running in the background. Open the terminal and execute cd (program directory) then execute

    * (Firefox) ./firefox -profilemanager
    * (Mozilla Suite) ./mozilla -profilemanager
    * (Thunderbird) ./thunderbird -profilemanager

Alternately, in a terminal type the path/to/firefox-mozilla-thunderbird -profilemanager
---

If I do that in a terminal window on this box, I get:

"bash: ./thunderbird: No such file or directory"

Then I try doing simple disk searches for the word "thunderbird", get nada.  Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 is loaded and running, it came standard with the Ubuntu distro.  But I can't find it.  Trying to "CD" around the directory structure at the terminal window gets me nowhere either, I can't see anything but "home", "desktop" and "examples".  It's like the terminal window is badly crippled.

What the hell?

[tyme]

mailbox:/C|/Documents and Settings/Owner/Application data/Thunderbird/Profiles/db4retjp.default/Mail/pop.prodigy.yahoo-1.com/Inbox
So how in hell do I tell Thunderbird 1.5 series to use THAT data!?

Find out where thunderbird is storing your data on the new system.
You probably only have one directory inside ~/.thunderbird/
If not, look inside ~/.thunderbird/profiles.ini and figure out which profile/directory you generally use.

Then copy the data to the appropriate directory.

IOW, if you have ~/.thunderbird/aisdf8gp.default/ then run:

cp -r "/windows/Documents and Settings/Owner/Application data/Thunderbird/Profiles/db4retjp.default/Mail/pop.prodigy.yahoo-1.com" ~/.thunderbird/aisdf8gp.default/Mail/

I'm not sure about setting up a mail account to download to to that mailbox by default.  Worst case, you can set up a new mail account that grabs mail from prodigy/yahoo, then copy the contents of the pop.prodigy.yahoo-1.com/ directory into the new mail-account directory.

[tyme]

If I do that in a terminal window on this box, I get:

"bash: ./thunderbird: No such file or directory"

That means either "thunderbird" doesn't exist, or the interpreter (listed on the first line of the "thunderbird" wrapper script) doesn't exist.

Then I try doing simple disk searches for the word "thunderbird", get nada.  Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 is loaded and running, it came standard with the Ubuntu distro.  But I can't find it.  Trying to "CD" around the directory structure at the terminal window gets me nowhere either, I can't see anything but "home", "desktop" and "examples".  It's like the terminal window is badly crippled.

Maybe ubuntu chroots terminal windows, but I really, really doubt it.  You really need to find someone who can look at what you're seeing.  I can't make sense of the situation from your description.

[lee n. field]

I spent a good part of this summer doing, among other things, just this (school I do things for got 30 'doze machines to replace a bunch of macs on teachers desks.  I set them up with Tbird, 'cause most of them used Netscape Mail, and got a lot of practice doing this.   Much easier than retrieveing messages from OSX's Mail app.)

Set up the account in the new copy of Thunderbird.  Do not download new messages, just set up the account.

Exit Thunderbird.

Whack all the files inside the new profile ( in RedmondOS c:\d&S\\Thunderbird\profiles\\mailbox\........    In Linux /home//.mozilla-thunderbird//Mail/.    OSX Tbird is something similar, but I don't have the details in front of me.).  If you see an Inbox file, you've got the right directory.

copy all the files from the equivalent location in the old TB, and drop them in to replace the files you just deleted in the new copy of Thunderbird.