Porting Thunderbird data to new PC

[zircon]

I know Thunderbird supports importing of email data. On my current computer I have several thousand email messages and a full address book, both of which I would like to port over to a new PC which will also be running Thunderbird (but on a fresh Windows install). I didn't see any "Export" option or anything to that effect, so what would be the best method of doing this?

[Kanthos]

Start Thunderbird and go to Account Settings on the Tools menu. Scroll down to Local Folders and click on it; on the right side you'll see, among other things, an entry named Local Directory. That tells you where Thunderbird is storing all your data. For example, mine is C:\Documents and Settings\mchase\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\5q3rnj90.default\Mail\Local Folders.

You'll want to back up one folder (to Mail, not Mail\Local Folders) to get folders for various e-mail accounts as well. I'm not entirely sure how they're used, but I'd copy everything to be safe.

On your new computer, start Thunderbird. You'll probably have to create the accounts from scratch, I don't know if there's an easy way to do that or not. When you've done so, find the Local Directory on your new machine, exit Thunderbird, and copy from your old machine to the new machine. You'll have to get the directory from your new machine since the profile name (5q3rnj90.default on mine) may be different.

That should import all your folders and messages. Like I said, you'll probably have to recreate your account information. The only other thing you should need is your address book, but the address book has its own export on the Tools menu.

I've never actually tried this myself, but there's no conceivable reason why it shouldn't work. I'll take a quick google to see if anything can confirm these steps. Edit: this tallks about exporting to another mail program; it more or less implies what I described about a Thunderbird-to-Thunderbird copy.

[Smoke]

You can also copy the e-mail datafiles to a separate folder(On another drive if required) and just point Thunderbird to that folder. It should tell you if it's found anything in there already and ask if you want to use those files.

As for accounts, I'm pretty sure there's an export function for that.