I recently migrated from Thunderbird to Postbox – a more professional Thunderbird client. The migration was really hassle-free, thanks to symlinks
Tip: Before you proceed with this guide, please read our symlink guide
Locate Your Old Thunderbird Profile And Create Backup
1. Step You need to know where your Thunderbird profile is. Read this guide to find out more, by default it is in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\
Profiles\XXXXXXXX.default\Mail\
2. Step Once you know that it is recommended to make a backup of it, copy it to D:\Mail or on a partition where you have a lot of disk space (inboxes can become quite large if you receive a lot of mails, mine is 15GB)
3. Step Alright, now we have that, let’s proceed
Installing Postbox And Migrating Thunderbird via Symlink
1. Step Install Postbox, I assume you install it in C:\Program Files\Postbox or a similar path
2. Step If you have installed it on C:, go to C:\Users\(yourusername)\AppData\Roaming\Postbox\Profiles
3. Step Now copy the exact path to the profile e.g. C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Postbox\Profiles\XXXX.default (username and XXX.default will be different) from the address bar using CTRL + C
4. Step Open a command prompt window and enter cd PASTE-PATH-TO-PROFILE (Right-click after entering cd and select Paste)
5. Step Now the rest is easy, enter mklink /J "xxxx.default" "D:\MailBackup\xxx.default" (IMPORTANT: Make sure you are actually cd’d into the full path when executing the command e.g. you MUST be in the Postbox profile folder itself)
Using Thunderbird On SSD With Large Inbox Symlinked To Another Drive
If you’re on a SSD you may not want to have Thunderbird inboxes on it – that would involve a lot disk writes and reads every day and could possibly shorten the lifespan of your SSD, so you may want to store it on another drive (if the decreased performance is worth it to you)
Read this article for information on running Thunderbird or Postbox on a SSD
