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I love Firefox Sync. Is there a similar way to synchronise Thunderbird?

I want to synchronise account settings, filters and address books. I never download e-mails, so this isn't an issue. There is no need to synchronise addons (I don't use Lightning or similar). I don't want an import, but a real synchronisation which reflects a change on all other associated Thunderbird installations. Is there a way to do this (whether automatic or with some tweaking)?

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1 Answer 1

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You could use Dropbox and then update the profiles.ini file to point to the profile folder in your Dropbox.

Windows: %AppData%\Thunderbird
Mac: ~/Library/Thunderbird/
Linux: ~/.thunderbird/

See Thunderbird Profiles for more information on how to find your profile.

After you copy it to Dropbox then open up the profiles.ini file which is located in the same folder and update the Path to point to the new location:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=../../Dropbox/Thunderbird.profile

You can of course change the folder name to be whatever you want. I'm not sure how spaces are handled though so you'll have to experiment if you like spaces in your names.

See Moving a profile for some more information and a caveat if you want to use absolute paths instead of relative.

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  • Will this sync filters too, or only the account settings?
    – rumtscho
    Jul 28, 2011 at 19:42
  • It will do everything: email and settings. I'm not sure about plugins.
    – matpie
    Jul 28, 2011 at 22:48
  • 4
    If one instance of Thunderbird writes there, will other running instances re-read the settings on-the-fly?
    – utapyngo
    Aug 13, 2013 at 10:08
  • I wish this was part of Thunderbird natively, and my mobile email clients too...
    – CMCDragonkai
    Jun 3, 2014 at 13:01
  • 3
    Alternatively if you don't trust Dropbox you could use a p2p sync like syncthing or BitTorrent Sync
    – j-i-l
    Jan 28, 2015 at 10:41

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