Mageia forum

Hi all

im going to be adding another friend to the migrated from windows nasty virus infected, turd that it is, to mageia

assume same version of thunderbird for now....

A question i have, is will his windows thunderbird data directory move successfully to linux/mageia or is it completely incompatible.

ive not analyzed the issue at this point at all, so seeing if anyone could save me some aggro.......

Has anyone done this successfully. Ive never tried it, but would be great full if any hindsight can be shared.

regards peter

I have done so successfully in the past. The only problem that I had was that Windows used upper case in the name of the ~/.thunderbird directory and so I had to rename that directory.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_from_Windows_to_Linux

Jim

Thanks Jim, much appreciated.

regards peter

Yep, did that years ago, started on windows with thunderbird 1.something and then moved over to linux.
Basically you can simply copy the profile from windows over to linux into ~/.thunderbird

Sadly the mozillazine article doesn't cover some special files. I can recommend the following, this only seems covered in this german site,
and mentions which files should be deleted when migrating from one mozilla product to another (which includes thunderbird > thunderbird).

https://translate.google.de/translate?s ... t=&act=url

Let me translate quickly:
- disable automatic fetching of mails under windows thunderbird in case she uses pop3 and removes the mail from the server (that is, if you can safely start tb - might not be safe with the malware infection)
- take a complete backup of the windows profile: %APPDATA%\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\ which translates to C:\Users\<Windows user name>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles if you do it under linux
- start thunderbird once on linux so it creates a profile folder, you can quit it then
- empty the newly created ~/.thunderbird/*default folder
- copy the windows profile folder content to ~/.thunderbird/*default

- delete the following files from the profile folder:

chrome\overlayinfo\
chrome\chrome.rdf
extensions\
extensions.cache
extensions.ini
extensions.rdf
panacea.dat
xpti.dat
localstore.rdf
compreg.dat
*.msf
*.~js - BUT NOT *.js !!!
*.bak
*.ini
*.mfl

The following should be left (could be a little more, depending on the system) - all files without extension in the following subdirectories:

Mail\
ImapMail\
News\

and furthermore:

News\*.rc
News\«news account name»\*.dat
(Imap)Mail\«account name»\filterlog.html
(Imap)Mail\«account name»\junklog.html
Mail\«account name»\popstate.dat
(Imap)Mail\«account name»\msgFilterRules.dat
Mail\«RSS account name»\feeditem.rdf
Mail\«RSS account name»\feeds.rdf
«8-charachter digit».s
signons.txt
user.js
prefs.js
*.mab
training.dat

Then fire up thunderbird.

For some more information on the purpose of the files in the profile folder, check
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_ ... hunderbird
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Files_and_fol ... hunderbird

If you have more questions just ask.