How in the Tech

Locating and moving your Thunderbird email profile

By Adam Myers ⋅ March 31, 2010 ⋅ Tags: File Management, Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is a popular open-source alternative to Microsoft Outlook by the same organization that brings us Firefox. Like Firefox, Thunderbird stores all it’s customization, settings, and email in a user profile which defaults to the Users folder in Windows. The profile folder is buried quite a few levels deep but it can be accessed quickly using a Windows environment variable called %APPDATA%. To jump to your Thunderbird profile location in Windows Explorer execute a run dialog window with WIN+R and type %AppData%\Thunderbird.

If you’ve recently upgraded to a lightning fast solid-state hard drive you are probably interested in keeping your C drive as clean and light as possible. Relocating your mail box to a new location is pretty simple with Microsoft Outlook – you just cut and paste the Personal Folder .pst file to a different folder. When you launch Outlook it will realize it’s mail folder is missing and prompt you to browse to the new location. Thunderbird, however, will not behave in this manner – rather it will assume there is no profile as if it was a new installation and initiate the New Profile Wizard. Clearly not what we want!

To successfully move your Thunderbird profile instead requires a modification to the profiles.ini text file located in %AppData%\Thunderbird folder above. The contents of the file are rather spartan by default; it includes just the pathing information to your user profile.

Opening the file in your text editor of choice it’s not overly complicated to see what needs changed. The two keys we are interested in are titled IsRelative and Path. Disable relative file paths by switching the key from 1 to 0. Lastly, change the Path key to the full path of the newly relocated Thunderbird profile.

When you next launch Thunderbird it will automatically open the profile in the new location, without any prompting or further intervention.