I posted a month or so ago, looking for suggestions of how to
consolidate my Thunderbird mailboxes from two PCs running Ubuntu Linux
onto a third, my primary computer.  One response in particular was
useful in finding where Thunderbird stores its folders and messages,
although there were details I still had to figure out for myself.

  It turns out that each Thunderbird message folder is represented to
the OS as a folder and two files of index/header information -- to find
subfolders that are present, TBird looks to the index file and NOT to
the OS folder contents....

  One of the machines that I had downloaded some messages to is named
Huron, so on my main machine I created an empty message folder named
"mail-huron".  Then, on huron, I created a folder immediately under
Local Folders named mail-huron, and moved all the other message folders
inside of that.  I created a folder named unread, also within
mail-huron, and moved all of the messages that were still in my Inbox
into that folder.  Oh, and I set TBird to "work offline" so it wouldn't
download any more new messages in the middle of this effort....
  Then I closed TBird, inserted a large-capacity USB flash drive, and
opened the folder browser.
  The first thing to do was enable the folder browser to show hidden
files, so I could find <home>/.ThunderBird (by default, in Unix and
Linux, files/folders whose name begins with "." are not shown...)
  Under .ThunderBird were a couple of entries:  .Profiles, information
about crashed sessions, and a folder whose name appeared to be a large
hexadecimal number.  Inside the last was a folder named "Local Folders",
and inside that was one named "mail-huron" and its two auxiliary files. 
I copied tese, folder and files, to my flash drive and took it home to
my main machine.
  Now recall that on my main machine at home, I had created an empty
mail-huron folder, so the folder and its auxiliary files already
existed, and "Local Files" hand an index entry enumerating "mail-huron"
as a subfolder.  I copied the "mail-hurn" folder and files from my flash
drive into the "Local Folders" folder under .ThunderBird on my home PC,
over top of the emties.
  Hurray!  Now when I opened Thunderbird, the "mail-huron" folder was
still in the list, but instead of being wmpty, it contained all of the
folders and messages that thad been on huron, and I could start manually
merging them into my local collection.  Whew!
  
David


  

             Do you want to signoff PCSOFT or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                   http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml