I recently had a bit of what we call in the industry “Windows-Death”. I couldn’t get in to my Windows account for love nor money (actually, money may have helped…) so I decided to bite the bullet and go back to using Ubuntu full time. The only thing that stopped me last time was a lack of support for my VoIP handset, but I have that set up on another PC now so we’re all good.

I had a lot of mail stored in Mozilla Thunderbird that I hadn’t backed up in ages, so thankfully I was able to migrate my profile across relatively easily. Here’s how in case it happens to you:

I used the Live Session option on my Ubuntu CD to first go in and copy my Thunderbird profile to a different hard disk. It can be located in your user directory (Vista: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\profiles; XP: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Local\Thunderbird\profiles). It’ll be a folder called something.default.

Copy that entire folder (preserving the name) to somewhere safe. Once you’re in Ubuntu, make sure you have access to that somewhere and then set up Thunderbird as per these instructions.

Once you have run Thunderbird once (make up some dummy information in the wizard so it creates you a profile and is ready to rock), close the program down and then using the terminal, type:
sudo cp -r your-safe-location/* /home/your-username/.mozilla-thunderbird/

Next, still in the terminal, type:
gksudo gedit /home/your-username/.mozilla-thunderbird/profiles.ini

Which will look something like:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1


[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=d8wxq6es.default
Default=1


Change the “Path=” to match the folder name that you copied across, then save the file. Close gedit, start up Thunderbird and that’s you ready to go!