Merge Thunderbird profiles

Old laptop, HP dv-9000 running XP, died, leaving both hard drives (C and D) in fine shape. Thunderbird was up-to-date as of early September 2011.

New laptop, HP HDX running Vista, has the latest Thunderbird, 9.0.1, holding all email since September 2011.

How do I merge the email from the old pc's drives into the new pc's profile?

The old profile had an Inbox and Local Folders supporting two accounts. All incoming email was directed to a sub-folder of Local Folders.

The new profile has three folders, one for each of the two accounts, and a Local Folders. All the incoming mail remains in the separate accounts folders.

 

All mail is kept in files like Inbox, or Sent. The equivalent .msf files are the "header file ", which are created from the files without extention. You cannot merge the mail, as the old Inbox would replace the new one, but you can rename the old Inbox and Sent file to Oldinbox, or something like that, and copy/paste the renamed file in the folder of your choice. All this should be done with TB closed, in Windows Explorer. When you open TB, it will have created its own, oldinbox.msf header file. After that if you want all mail in one pile, you can move the e-mails from Oldinbox to Inbox, this time with TB open.
I recommend to keep mail in separate folders, so that you do not have overcrowding.

 

Thanks, Westside. I'll give it a try and report back here.