How do I import email, settings etc. from 10.10 for Thunderbird in 12.04?

Question

I just recently installed 12.04 on my computer, and when I try to import email and settings from another drive, the import wizard asks, "Import from" but there's no dialog or browse facility to tell it where to import from.

Am I missing something? How do I import when there's nowhere to tell it where to import from? I'm using Thunderbird on both drives, the old OS is 10.10.

Answer 1

If you have no useful Thunderbird settings on the new computer, it might be easiest to just copy your Thunderbird profile over directly.

First exit Thunderbird and move its settings out of the way with the following commands in a terminal:

cd ~
mv .thunderbird thunderbird.bak

Now copy over your old Thunderbird settings (assuming the other drive is accessible somewhere):

cp -a /path/to/old/home/dir/.thunderbird .

When you start Thunderbird again, it should be using the settings from your old drive.

If things do not go as planned, you can recover the settings from your new drive with:

rm -rf .thunderbird
mv thunderbird.bak .thunderbird