How do I move Thunderbird to a new machine?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com.
I'm going to be honest,
this is one of the reasons that I love Thunderbird as a desktop email program.
It's a program you install on your PC and you then use it to access your e-mail.
You can use it to back up your email,
which is something I do recommend you consider doing.
But it's also a perfectly fine email
program to just use for your day to day email.
I used it for years.
These days I'm doing most of my stuff
on the web, but even so, I've still got Thunderbird running on another machine
here in my office to download all of my email and back it up.
So the question comes up.
What happens if I get a new machine, how do I move everything that is
Thunderbird, the program and all of my email and all
of my settings and all of my everything's to my new machine.
As it turns out, it's significantly easier
than you might expect as long as you know the terminology and where to look.
So what I'm going to do in this video is
literally move a Thunderbird installation from one machine to another.
As you know, I do use virtual machines
here so we be able to flip fairly quickly between two different machines,
one that already has Thunderbird installed on it with e-mail
and then another that doesn't. And we'll install Thunderbird from scratch.
And we will do "the thing" that gets all of the email moved over.
So there's a secret word
that you need to know when you're about to move Thunderbird.
It actually is one of those things where once you get it, you get it.
But that word is profile.
Thunderbird deals with profiles. So you can have multiple profiles if you want.
In general, most of us have only one, and that's fine.
But it's in that profile where all
of the information and all of your email is stored.
So let's run over to my Windows 10 home machine where I have Thunderbird installed
and look at what it means to have or be a profile.
So here we are in Windows 10 home.
You can see I've brought up the system information dialog just so that you can
see that this is, in fact, my home machine.
It's a little different than the pro machine we'll be switching to in a moment,
but it's at least clearly a Windows 10 home machine.
And as you can see, I've already got Thunderbird running.
It's here. It's doing whatever it's doing for this
askLeoexample@Hotmail.com email address.
It's mostly junk, I think that I get in there.
But for the most part, you know, it's a perfectly valid,
viable email account and I happen to be using Thunderbird to manage it.
So step one. This is my old machine.
This is the machine we're moving from.
So step one, of course, is to shut down Thunderbird.
We don't want Thunderbird running while we're making this while we're doing this
next, what we're going to do is run a folder.
Now, there are several ways to get here, but what I'm going to have you do is
Run %APPDATA%.
That actually is a shortcut that will open up a specific folder on your machine.
It's C:users/ your login ID/appdata/roaming.
You can see why percent %APPDATA% is so much easier in there.
You'll see there's a Thunderbird folder.
If we double click on that now, all of a sudden there's information about
profiles and profiles.ini and other things.
We're going to start by taking
the profiles folder and sending that to a compressed folder.
You can see we now have profiles zip
in this folder, and I'm also going to add to it profiles.ini.
Which I did by just dragging and dropping that file onto the profiles.zip file.
So now I have essentially everything you
need, everything that needs to be moved is now in profile.zip.
Sowhat we'll do next is insert a USB drive.
In my case, it doesn't matter how you do
this, but what I'll be doing is inserting a USB drive.
And we can now on that drive, I'm going to go ahead and just copy
the zip file,
so we'll go to that drive and we will simply paste the file that we copied.
Now we've got profile.zip on our USB drive.
I'm going to go ahead and safely eject that.
And now we're actually done with this machine.
Now it's time to switch to our other
machine, which for me, of course, is a mouse click.
Here's my Windows 10 Pro Machine again.
I've got up the system properties so
that you can see that this is a different machine.
It's running Windows 10 pro.
It's got a slightly different background.
The taskbar behaves a little bit differently.
It automatically hides, that kind of thing.
So we know we've got this.
What we do next is download and install Thunderbird.
The easiest way to do that is to go to
Thunderbird.Net.
Hit free download.
And we will do a save as. And I'm just going to go and let that save
in my downloads folder. You have the option, of course,
of supporting Thunderbird with some money if you want to.
Thunderbird is completely free.
But of course, donations like this are the kinds of things that allow free
software to be free for so many other people.
The download is complete.
I'm going to go ahead and open that file.
At this point, I'm done with the browser,
so I'm going to go ahead and close that to keep it out of the way.
And we have the Thunderbird installation
wizard. I'll hit next, always, always, always choose custom.
It doesn't make a real difference
for Thunderbird, but that is a habit you must develop to avoid potentially unwanted
programs and other things from getting installed in your machine.
The options are default installation folder, which is fine in my case.
I actually use this as an opportunity not to put shortcuts on my desktop.
As you can see, I keep a very clean desktop.
That's just personal preference.
But of course I do want Thunderbird in my start folder.
And using Thunderbird as your default mail
application, my guess is if you are running Thunderbird,
if you are literally trying to move it, you're probably in a case where you've
been using Thunderbird as your mail program to begin with.
So this is something you probably want to leave turned on.
And we'll go ahead and let it launch Mozilla Thunderbird now.
Now, at this point, Thunderbird is asking us to go ahead and set up an initial email
address, an account that you already have. Basically it wants to be configured.
It doesn't have anything configured by default, which makes sense.
But we don't want to do this.
We actually don't want to set up anything at this point.
I'm going to go ahead and cancel it and then immediately exit Thunderbird.
Now, this time we're going to go ahead and run that %APPDATA% again.
This time you'll see that there is, in fact, a Thunderbird folder.
And sure enough, it's got a profiles and a profiles.ini.
What I'm going to do next is insert
the USB drive that contains that zip folder we created.
Here, it's on a different drive letter, of course, thumb drive in Drive E.
I'm going to expand it.
There's profiles.zip.
So what we're going to do is once again do a copy on profiles.zip,
go back to where we were before this folder and pasted it in.
So there's profiles.zip.
Now I'm going to open profiles.zip.
These two things need to be expanded
into the parent directory. So in Thunderbird, where we have profiles
and profiles.ini. I'm actually going to take the step of just deleting those.
Because there isn't anything we care about in them, remember, we did not set up any
email accounts, we didn't do anything worthwhile.
Instead, what I'm going to do now is double click again on profiles.zip,
select both of these and then drag and drop them onto Thunderbird.
You can see it says copy to Thunderbird.
It's expanding the contents of the zip file. And now if we go back
to the Thunderbird folder, you'll see that there are profiles and profiles.ini.
If you like, at this point, you can go ahead and delete the zip file.
We're going to go ahead and close the explorer window.
And start Mozilla Thunderbird.
And there it is, there we are now looking
at Mozilla Thunderbird, completely configured for the accounts
that I had on the other machine, including the password authentication.
In other words, there's really nothing I have to do.
All I can do is start using Thunderbird and doing my email.
Now that it's moved to this other machine, I hope you can see why I find this such
an appealing approach for moving email from one machine to another.
And one of the reasons I like Thunderbird
so much, it's actually better than you think.
Remember that Thunderbird is completely cross platform.
There are editions of Thunderbird for PCs,
for Macs and for Linux, and to move not just from one machine
to another, but to move from one operating system to another.
It's exactly the same way.
All you need to do is grab the copy
of your profiles and move them into the appropriate location
for the other operating system that you happen to be moving to.
Install Thunderbird there and you're good to go.
I've done this. I used to run Thunderbird on a Mac and I
just moved to a PC by doing exactly what you just saw me do here.
So I hope that's helpful.
I hope that removes a little bit of the mystery of moving email from one
machine to another, specifically when you're using Thunderbird.
For updates and links and for more detailed written word about this process.
Certainly if you have any questions, there's the opportunity to leave comments.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com.Thanks for watching.