Migrating Mozilla Thunderbird to a New Machine

Mozilla Thunderbird is an email client alternate to the Microsoft's client called Outlook. 

Scenario:

If you are a person that has to deal with users that use outlook on a daily basis, and years of email is stored within their outlook profile and the time has come where a data transfer need's to be done (from an old machine to a new machine for example), then you would know that outlook could absolutely be a pain! 

But now you are working on a machine that needs data transfer to a new area (like a new machine for example), and you notice that the user on the machine is a heavy Mozilla Thunderbird user. How the heck do we transfer the data for that???

A Brief Explanation:

Migrating a Thunderbird profile to a new machine is rather easy. In fact, it's easier than migrating outlook data/profiles all together. All you have to do is copy and paste the Thunderbird data from the old location on the old machine to the new location on the new machine (you have to open and close Thunderbird on the new machine first), and edit the profiles.ini to the name of the profile folder. That easy right?

A More Detailed Explanation:

1. Install the latest version of Mozilla Thunderbird onto your new machine. Link: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
2. Open Thunderbird on your new machine, but DO NOT setup any accounts. Simply close it after opening. The purpose of this step is to allow Thunderbird to create its folder structure (that we will need in later steps).
3. Go to your old machine and make sure that Thunderbird is not running.
4. On your old machine, locate the profile. For Windows XP users, you can typically find it here: C:\Documents and Settings\[Username]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles. For Windows Vista and 7 users, you can typically find it here: C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles.
5. You should see something named "XXXXXXX.default", copy the one that contains the correct data you need (if there is only one profile folder there, then copy it). Any media to copy it on if fine, as long as you can access it on the new machine.
6. Go back to the new machine and make sure that Thunderbird is completely closed. After that, go to the profile folder located on your new machine. Refer to step 4 for the correct (default) folder paths.
7. When you are in the profile folder on the new machine, you will notice that another folder that looks like "XXXXXXX.default" already exists; Delete it, and paste your folder from the old machine there.

The data is now transferred and we are almost done. All we have to do it edit Thunderbird's "profile.ini" so that Thunderbird will see your data. Easy, here is how to do it:

1. Profile.ini is located in the root of the Thunderbird folder in your application data folder. Here are the paths to find it: For Windows XP users: C:\Documents and Settings\[Username]\Application Data\Thunderbird. For Windows Vista and 7 users: C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird.
2. Locate and open "profiles.ini" in any text editor (Notepad or Wordpad works).
3. Once opened, look for a line that says "Path=Profiles/XXXXXXX.default". You need to change the name XXXXXXX.default to the name of the profile that you copied and pasted over from the old machine to the new machine. (Essentially, your just replacing the X's).
4. Save, and exit your text editor. Your Done! 

Open Mozilla Thunderbird and verify that it works correctly. Enjoy!

If you get an error stating that Thunderbird is already running in another window, this is most likely because the name of the profile in "profiles.ini" does not match the name of the actual profile. I would verify that if this occurs.