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I cannot copy my thunderbird profile from one home to another. This should simply be a matter of copying /home/thomas/.thunderbird to /home/viking/.thunderbird

I did let the new thunderbird autocreate the ~/.thunderbird directory then I closed it and copied over the good old profile data (and removed the autogenerated empty data first).

But I got this annoying message:
"Thunderbird is already running, but not responding. To open a new window you must close the existing thunderbird process, or restart your system"

Well it is NOT running and there is no lock file to be found.
I even removed thunderbird and reinstalled it with the .thunderbird directory in place.

If I remove it then thunderbird works as planed and creates the .thundebird directory which is rather empty.

So how on earth can I transfer my mail data?

A sadder tale was never told.

One thing I have encountered is file ownership is known to the OS by uid and gid. So, whenever I do a new install, I create a user with the same name, same uid, same gid.

It sometimes helps to become root and

chown -R viking.viking /home/viking

or chown -R viking.viking /home/viking/.thunderbird

where the second viking in viking.viking is your primary group.

Another good help forum for matters Mozilla is here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/index.php

rolf wrote:One thing I have encountered is file ownership is known to the OS by uid and gid. So, whenever I do a new install, I create a user with the same name, same uid, same gid.

And the password the same (sorry, I haven't caught up with "gid" yet, anyone care to enlighten me?)

rolf wrote:It sometimes helps to become root and

chown -R viking.viking /home/viking

or chown -R viking.viking /home/viking/.thunderbird

where the second viking in viking.viking is your primary group.

Works like a charm every time. Have used this a LOT.
So, what you could try, is say the .thunderbird you want to keep is in /home/viking/.thunderbird, and you want to put it in /home/tom/.thunderbird, then you'd do:

then, do:

I'd use cp to be sure you don't lose it as-is.

Thanks guys!

Chmoding and chowning was all it took.
And I had to copy the content of the first default folder over to the created folder in the new home.

This case is solved.

Now I'm having this issue. I can't load my own .thunderbird profile with thunderbird (same user i.d., same password, everything the same in /home). I've chown'ed this to death, and keep getting this when I try to get an ls on the folder:

I've even tried chowning it to a different user on the system, and then back, but still no go.

viking, what chmod command did you use? Thanks.

I did let the new thunderbird autocreate the ~/.thunderbird directory then I closed it and copied over the good old profile data (and removed the autogenerated empty data first).

I think this is the part you need to do

Ah, OK, thanks. Although unfortunately, I'm not absolutely sure it will work. I'm finding other things in my /home that I'm not given access to... like... oh, say, Documents, Downloads, Pictures, etc.

I think I got a different UID - chowning the whole /home/myuser isn't even working.

I guess that's something for help. It's OTT here. Could be one of the pitfalls of "downgrading" back to 32-bit, and to Mageia2 at that, too.

Just came across this while looking for something else on the site.

Moving Thunderbird Data to a New Computer

Manually moving files

If you are moving from one operating system to another (such as changing from Windows to Mac) then you must manually move your profile from one computer to the next. You'll need to first back up your profile using the instructions on the Profiles page, then follow the directions on that page for "Restoring to a different location."

Hoping this is helpful.