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Want to restore email, folders, mail rules, address book, but not accounts.

  • 4 replies
  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by zoogod

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I have Thunderbird installed on a Win7 machine and I want to restore <<certain parts>> of my Profile to a fresh installation of Thunderbird on a Win10 machine.

I have already installed Thunderbird and setup accounts on the Win10 machine . It took a long time to get the accounts setup correctly, so I don't want to mess with the account settings on this new machine (i.e., I don't want to overwrite the new account settings with the old account settings) .

I have already backed up the Profiles folder from the Win7 machine to an external drive. Now I simply want to restore the following items to Thunderbird on my Win10 machine: Email, folders (and tree), mail rules, and address book . I do not want to restore the accounts.

Is this possible? How is it done.

ps. I used to do this task easily with MozBackup, but not sure whether that application even works under Win10.

In advance, thank you!

I have Thunderbird installed on a Win7 machine and I want to restore <<certain parts>> of my Profile to a fresh installation of Thunderbird on a Win10 machine. I have already installed Thunderbird and setup accounts on the Win10 machine . It took a long time to get the accounts setup correctly, so I don't want to mess with the account settings on this new machine (i.e., I don't want to overwrite the new account settings with the old account settings) . I have already backed up the Profiles folder from the Win7 machine to an external drive. Now I simply want to restore the following items to Thunderbird on my Win10 machine: Email, folders (and tree), mail rules, and address book . I do not want to restore the accounts. Is this possible? How is it done. ps. I used to do this task easily with MozBackup, but not sure whether that application even works under Win10. In advance, thank you!

All Replies (4)

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There are two add-on I personally like to use: Import Export Tools More functions for address book with those you can import (and export) a folder or address book in lots of different ways as well as setting up your backups.

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Gnospen thank you for passing along this info. I am a little cautious however about using this application. Hope to hear from others on this forum about alternative methods, before deciding what to do. Thank you again.

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Chosen Solution

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Wonder of wonders... this was much easier than I thought.

To move the address book, I merely copied over the history.mab and abook.mab files, from the old profile into the new profile.

Then i copied over the dictionary file, persdict.dat.

Lastly, from within the main "Mail" folder, i copied over just the sub-folder "Local Folders" (containing the folders, the folder tree structure, all stored messages and message rules).

Of course, I did not copy over any of the .pop accounts since I didn't want them, and had already created new accounts on the target machine.

Done. After I restarted Thunderbird, it took a few minutes for the hour glass to go away (still processing something i guess) and i also got an error message that said my address book file could not be read. But after rebooting and re-opening Thunderbird, that error disappeared. Everything I wanted, was exactly where i wanted it.

Thanks guys.

Modified by zoogod