You lost a mail, you say? You moved a bunch of e-mails from one folder to another and the counter did not increase as expected with the number of unreads in that folder. Unfortunately, sometimes Thunderbird gets confused and loses track of its e-mails. But no need to despair – the only thing damaged is normally the index file. Shut down Thunderbird and locate the folderwith your mail folder and then delete the associated *.msf-file. Then, restart Thunderbird, locate the folder again and wait while Thunderbird recreates the *.msf file. Your lost e-mails should now be back.

In case you wonder why the Thunderbird mailbox format is so easy to handle, here is why: It follows the standard and, thus, is in UNIX mailbox format. The mail file mbox on a UNIX, Linux, FreeBSD, you name it, is in excactly the same format. This makes the format highly portable. You can convert to/from UNIX/Windows newline and be up and running on a totally different OS with your mail file in mere minutes. For some mail readers you might have to rename the file too. Big deal.

If you want to do a “merge” of two profiles or if you have been working on the same accounts on two different systems and now want to merge them, you can still do this fairly easy, but it is a bit more work to get things done in an orderly fashion. Firstly, move all files from the source computer to the target machine, as described here – but do keep serious track of what directory is your main profile directory. Then, determine what accounts (these are shown as directories like myaccount and myaccount-1) in your profile you need to (temporarily) move into your profiles directory.

Make a temporary account of some sort, then go to the account settings, go to the Server Settings submenu and check out the Local directory item. This will tell you where the profile points now and you can either a) move everything into the new subdirectory (if so, make sure you don’t overwrite new templates if you have upgraded) or b) point to the old one. I suggest you stick with a

When everything has been moved, cleaned up and checked, you have a new, efficient profile with elements from the old one. On my system I had a lot of empty accounts, so a cleanup is probably the very best way to “move” a profile. Lots of work, but your system is afterwards very much up-to-date.

If you for some reason need to move your Thunderbird mailboxes to another PC, here is how to do it… There are two different scenarios and I will cover them both in two different articles.

This article will tell you how to move your entire profile from one computer to another. That is actually ridiculously simple:

• First of all – install Thunderbird on the target computer
• Assuming this is under Windows, locate: C:\Documents and Settings\"Knut Torgersen"\"Application Data"\Thunderbird\Profiles
• If you have several profile directories, do some investigating to find out what profile is the correct one. Move – or copy (I prefer move) the entire profile directory to the same directory on your target system.
• Modify Profiles.ini in your Thunderbird directory to represent the now moved profile.

Note: You can get to your Application Data folder fairly easy: cd %appdata% This works because Windows store many of its strange paths as ready-made environment variables.