How to setup Thunderbird on dual boot XP/7

[Hamnrye]

My current mail program on XP is Mozilla Thunderbird. I have W7 on it's own partition on the computer and would like to use Thunderbird with W7 but share all the profiles and mail from XP. Ideally, if I access mail when on XP it would show up when back on W7 and vice versa. I googled this but either the info is really old or primarily for doing this with Linux and XP.

 

[usasma]

As I recall, you can do this by setting up TBird on one OS, then (from the other OS) you'll change the profile store information to point at the profile on the OS that you set it up on.

I did something similar by setting up my profile on a separate hard drive - but found that things were too confusing in the long run. I ended up using PopPeeper on all my systems to check my email, and kept TBird only on one system (for actually receiving it). If necessary, I'm able to respond to emails in PopPeeper or I access the webmail server for my different email accounts while on the other systems. FYI - I use Hotmail Popper (last freeware version) and YPops for my TBird installation.

 

[Barman58]

You can point the profile of your second (W7?), install of Thunderbird,using the thunderbird.exe -p command, (type it into the search bar), and browsing to the original profile.

One thing you may want to consider however is if possible it may be better to utilize IMAP for your mail (if your provider supports this), as this system automatically synchronizes your online and offline mail store it will allow you to use whatever mail client you wish on each OS, (assuming again that they support IMAP)

 

[Avien]

As someone mentioned earlier.

You can move your profile to a drive then when you setup the account on windows 7 you change that account email link to the one you saved from your xp install. I currently do this for backup purposes.

I have my Thunderbird email accounts in a folder called mail in my User Directory, and then all i have to do is back that up to my server and i am done. I can access this from any OS on my computer so long as i change the account settings in Thunderbird.

If you need a walkthrough Ill be happy to help, i'll even include pictures for your convience.

 

[mlevy]

I've done as Avien did. I have two 250 GB drives in my system. One contains my 2 OS partitions (XP/7), the other contains my data. On the root of that one is my Mozilla profiles folder, I then just ran the profile manager for Thunderbird/Firefoox before I started each program the first time and pointed to that directory for the profile.

As it turns out, I've been doing most of my browsing/email in 7 and just playing COD4 in XP for the better FPS and use of Ventrilo. Coincidentally, I have a game that actually plays better in 7 than in XP.

 

[Hamnrye]

Avien, I'd like to take you up on that tutorial.

 

[Avien]

Will do when i have time. Might be later since I have a wedding to attend today and am apart of it. Based on what you posted on my profile page you got it all sorted out so hopefully you won't mind if it takes a little bit.