But how do you get your Thunderbird emails to the new computer? It is actually very easy to do providing that the old data is still available and readable.

First thing you need to do is to locate the Thunderbird profile directory on the old hard drive or computer. The profile stores all account information including emails in the inbox, send out, email account information and attachments.

Check the Mozilla Zine article for the paths. Make sure the data is available on the new computer, either by connecting the hard drive to the computer or copying the data to CD, DVD or removable storage devices.

Install Mozilla Thunderbird on the new computer but do not run it after installation if possible. The first run creates a profile on the new computer. Now copy the full profile directory from the old hard drive to the new computer or new hard drive. Make sure that you copy it using the right path information taken from the Mozilla Zine article.

If you already run Thunderbird you have a profile already. Do not worry, it is not that bad. You can simply copy the data from the old Thunderbird profile folder into the new profile. Please note that this will remove all information stored in the new profile which means that if you have setup email accounts and received emails, well, they are gone after that process.

If you do not want that you can copy the data next to the existing profile folder. It is not the best solution though as you can only launch one profile which means you would need to switch between profiles or find a way to merge them.

Whatever it may be it turns out to be very, very easy to move a single profile or even all profiles from the default location to another one. The first step is to close the Thunderbird email client so that it will not write data to the profile folder anymore. The default location of the Thunderbird profile folder depends on the operating system in use, below is a list of common locations:

• Windows XP/2000, %AppData%Thunderbird
• Windows 95/98/Me, WINDOWS\Application Data\Thunderbird
• Linux, ~/.thunderbird/
• Mac OS X, ~/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird/

Copy one or several of the Thunderbird profiles to the new location. Now open up the file profiles.ini in the original folder and edit the path pointing to the new profile folder locations accordingly. You also need to change the parameter IsRelative=1 to IsRelative=0. Please note that this is valid for all profiles which means that you need to add the full path (e.g. c:\thunderbird\profiles\profile.code\ in the Windows operating system) to profiles that are kept in the default location. Start the Thunderbird email client. If everything worked well it should display the emails and other data as usual.