Move Thunderbird Email Profiles To Another Location

The email client Mozilla Thunderbird uses a similar structure of storing data

in so called profiles which are saved by default in the user directory of the operating system.There

are a number of reasons why some users might want to move the data from the Thunderbird folder

to another custom folder....

Some that instantly come to mind are running out of storage on the default

hard drive, moving the profile to a hard drive that promises speed improvements or moving it to an

encrypted folder on another hard drive for security reasons.

Whatever it may be it turns out to be very, very easy to move a single profile or even all profiles

from the default location to another one. The first step is to close the Thunderbird email client so

that it will not write data to the profile folder anymore. The default location of the Thunderbird

profile folder depends on the operating system in use, below is a list of common locations:

• Windows XP/2000, %AppData%Thunderbird

• Windows 95/98/Me, WINDOWS\Application Data\Thunderbird

• Linux, ~/.thunderbird/

• Mac OS X, ~/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird/

Copy one or several of the Thunderbird profiles to the new location. Now open up the file

profiles.ini in the original folder and edit the path pointing to the new profile folder locations

accordingly. You also need to change the parameter IsRelative=1 to IsRelative=0. Please note that

this is valid for all profiles which means that you need to add the full path (e.g.

c:\thunderbird\profiles\profile.code\ in the Windows operating system) to profiles that are kept in

the default location. Start the Thunderbird email client. If everything worked well it should display

the emails and other data as usual.