It's not been specified which OS the OP is using and I don't know where on Windoof the Thunderbird profile directory is, so I'll answer for most popular Linux distributions.
There is a profile directory under $HOME/.thunderbird/
and a profile.ini
. The profile.ini
tells Thunderbird which of the folders in that directory to use as profile folder when starting Thunderbird. For example I renamed my profile folder to profilefolder
and my profile.ini
looks like this:
[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1
[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=profilefolder
This gives me a hint when backing up the profile as well. When you want to move it to another machine, run Thunderbird on the other machine at least once, so that it creates this profile directory structure and files in it and then just copy the profile.ini
and the profilefolder
to the $HOME/.thunderbird
directory. The profile.ini
shall overwrite the existing one and the next time you start Thunderbird it loads the copied profile.