Location of Thunderbirf email in Mandriva

[valentineg]

I installed Madriva then installed Kubuntu and now Mandriva won't boot. The partition for mandriva is still there and I can access my docs etc via Kunbutu. I plan to delete the Mandriva partition now that I am running Kubuntu but I want to retrieve all my old emails from Thunderbird on the Mandriva partition. Any idea where they are stored or how to go about copying them? I just started out farting around with Linux this past summer so my knowledge of using the terminal is pretty limited.

[schwim]

Hey there valentine,

In almost all linux installs(well, all I've seen) app data gets saved in the same place unless you told Tbird to store it somewhere else, which is the user's(you) home directory(/home/yourusername) and it's usually hidden from the default view in a file explorer. If you want to access your Thunderbird folders, you want to find the data folder under your user's home. It should be located at /home/username/.thunderbird(or something similar). Once you find it, inside you should find a profiles folder and inside it is your profile. It's created of a senseless alphanumeric string. You want to save that folder to your new Thunderbird application. Save that folder to the /home/username/.thunderbird/profiles folder on your working install. All you have to do then is edit your profiles.ini under the new thunderbird folder to use the new profile folder. This tutorial gives you pretty good detail on how to do that.

Let us know if you have a problem.

[valentineg]

Funny thing. I get to the home/user/thunderbird folder and can't get past the thunderbird folder. It shows that it's empty and I get an error that says "Could not enter folder". Any thoughts?

[schwim]

Hi there Valentine,

It's because you're not the owner of the files. Try this.

open a terminal

su
<enter superuser password>
cd /home/olduser (where the thunderbird folder that you need the profile from resides)
chown -R <yournewuser> .Thunderbird (or whatever it's called)
chgrp -R <yournewuser>

That should change owner of .thunderbird and all contents inside to your user so you can access the files.

Let us know if you still have a problem.