When moving from an old computer to a new computer, alot of profiles get left behind. Some we can afford to lose the baggage and start afresh.

But some, like IM and email, we like to transfer the data from an old computer to a new computer. You may need to read and reply to mails already downloaded on the old computer.

Instead of copying the mail folder everytime, what you could do is to put the mail data on a portable diskdrive. This way you could carry it around and read it at home and in office.

I do not use Thunderbird in this way anymore (using GMail) but this should still work (For the 1.0.x version at least)

It is really quite simple. On WinXP,

1. Quit Thunderbird if it is running
2. Look for Application Data/Thunderbird under C:Documents and Settingsusername
3. Copy the folder and put it into the portable diskdrive
4. In the (copied) folder, open the file profile.ini
5. Change these 2 lines

   IsRelative=1
   Path=/Profiles/somenames

   to

   IsRelative=0
   Path=drive:/full/path/to/profile/

6. Start Thunderbird and all the former mailboxes will appear. Done!

Related Post:

• From Pegasus Mail to Thunderbird to GMail
• Exporting Pegasus Mail to Thunderbird

For years I resisted Outlook, choosing to stand by Pegasus Mail. Pegasus is showing sign of age. The development is slow and for a long time it was not able to handle Chinese.

I moved to Thunderbird when 0.8 came out. It was able to handle Chinese in UTF8 which was what I needed badly.

It wasn’t easy for me as well. Pegasus had been my email companion for almost 9 years before the switch. There are so many automated filters, identities, and preference that just works. If it’s not broken why fix it?

Thunderbird is useful if you download email to you local PC or notebook and read the email offline.

Thunderbird did not last long. Mail started to appear in my GMail folder in October 2005. After trying out briefly, all my incoming email are now handled by GMail.

GMail is great if you are constantly online. It takes care of spams at the server end which mean you do not need to download all the spam before you can filter it.

The resistance to switching email program is very high. First, there is a whole lot of email archive to transfer over. Then there is the learning curve, to re-acustomise to the many small daily activities that had built around an interface that had grown so familiar.

To ease the transition, if you have many accounts, one way (which I did) is to move a low volume account to the new email program. Try out the features and test out the functions. When comfortable, transfer the rest to make a complete switch.

If you are using Pegasus and want to switch to Thunderbird, read my migration guide.

If you want to move on to GMail, I suggest leaving the old email behind and start afresh. There no easy way to migrate mail into GMail. Despite the huge 2.5G mail space, it will still quickly fill up in future.

Thunderbird is at http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/

GMail is at http://mail.google.com/

Related Post:

• Reading Thunderbird mail between computers
• Exporting Pegasus Mail to Thunderbird

Since moving from Pegasus Mail to Thunderbird, the old mail had been tucked away. Today I needed a very old email in the old Pegasus archive to recover an old account password. A good excuse to take the time and export all the old mail to Thunderbird.

There are 2 ways to do it

1. copy mail folders
2. use IMAP

The first way is fine if there is not may folders to export. Unfortunately that was not my case. It took a great deal of frustration before I decided to go with the second way.

Here’s how.

Copying the Mail folders

Thunderbird mail file is actually the unix mailbox format. Pegasus is also able to store in this format although it is not the default, so some work is required. Steps as follows,

1. Start Pegasus Mail.
2. Create folder in Pegasus in Unix Mailbox Format.
• In the Folders windows click Add…
• Message folder select Unix Mailbox Format
3. Copy your email from the original folder to this folder.
4. Go to the Pegasus Mail folder on the system.
5. Locate a file name like UNXnnnnn.MBX (eg. UNX06097.MBX)
   Sorting files by modify date would help here.
6. Copy this file to Thunderbird folder on the system
   probably
   C:Documents and SettingsuserApplication DataThunderbirdProfilesdefaultxxxxxxxx.sltMailmail_account
7. Start Thunderbird.
8. A new folder with name UNXnnnnn.MBX should appear in your mail account with all the mails.
9. Repeat for all other folders.

By the time I reached the 7th folders, I realise this is not the way to go. There are still 100s of folders and I can spend the whole night.

Using IMAP

IMAP to the rescue.

In order to do this you first got to have an IMAP account. My hosting at Fusion Flux happened to support it. Cool!

Here’s how.

1. Set up Pegasus Mail to connect to the IMAP account.
   Tools -> IMAP profile… -> New…
2. Fill up the required settings and connect to the IMAP server
3. At this point, if the connection is successful, an IMAP mailbox will appear
4. Create folders in the IMAP mailbox
5. Copy messages to the IMAP folders
6. Start Thunderbird and connect to the IMAP account.
7. Copy folders from IMAP account to local filesystem.

One warning, if you are copying large folder and/or using IMAP over SSL, the process can be pretty slow. But at least the copying can work in the background.

Hope this help you to migrate from Pegasus Mail to Thunderbird.

Related Post:

• Reading Thunderbird mail between computers
• From Pegasus Mail to Thunderbird to GMail