I want Thunderbird mail folders not in default location

I have been using Thunderbird for several releases now (I think I started with version 0.6), and ans you can guess, I've become rather attached to it!

I'm in the proces of upgrading from Win2K to WinXP Pro, and rather than simply zap my main Win2K partition, I've set up a separate "slim-line" install of WinXP Pro on a separate partition, to give me continuity of service for at least email and browsing, while I rebuild my main partition with WinXP. I'm almost set up - no problem migrating my Firefox bookmarks from the Win2K installation - but I seem to have hit a brick wall trying to persuade Thunderbird to keep the mail folders (inboxes &c for my various email accounts) on the "User Data" partition, rather than in \Documents and Settings\ian\Application Data\Thunderbird\...

The annoying thing is that the setup for earlier versions of Thunderbird let me do this - both my Win2K setup and my wife's WinXP Home setup have the Thunderbird mail folders on the "User Data" partition, but I can't remember exactly how I did it, and after ferreting through the Thunderbird menus and Googling (which is how I found this forum) I'm no further forward.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance

Ian Park

 

Welcome to the Forum, Quasimodo!

Ian,

In the Thunderbird Account Settings | Server Settings, scroll down to the "Local directory" field. Enter the path to your Mail Account folder. That should work...

 

Hi Ramona

Thanks for the response. That's what I *used* to be able to do in earlier versions of Thunderbird, but version 1.5 (or at least the installation I've got...) doesn't show the possibility of setting the local directory for inbox storage!

As it happens, I found by doing some digging around on the Mozilla forums that there *is* a way to do it, which I'll document for anyone else who is scratching around with the same problem.

In \Documents and Settings\ian\Application Data\Thunderbird (to see this you need to set folder options to show hidden files & folders), there's a file "profiles.ini ". The content as set up when I inatalled Thunderbird was:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/9hmbkwsn.default
Default=1

I edited this to:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=0
Path=G:\ian\Thunderbird\9hmbkwsn.default
Default=1

(I use drive G: as my user data partition.)

I then backed up the contents of the G:\ian\Thunderbird\Mail folder (which contains the contents of the inboxes for my 3 email accounts); shifted the contents of my Documents and Settings\Ian\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\9hmbkwsn.default folder to G:\ian\Thunderbird; and copied the backed up contents of my Mail folder to the newly created G:\ian\Thunderbird\Mail folder. I started Thunderbird, and the inboxes for all three mail accounts showed up correctly.

The next interesting step is to tweak the "profiles.ini" file for each setup of Thunderbird, so that I can access my mail no matter whether I'm logged in as the root user or ian on the "main" partition or the "maintenance" partition. That simply means copying the content of the modified "profiles.ini" file as above to the appropriate \Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Thunderbird folder on the appropriate partition.

I hope this is useful...

All the best

Ian

 

Ian,

Congratulations for finding the solution on your own, as that would have been my next suggestion. That solution can be found in the Thunderbird Knowledge Base: How to Manage Profiles.