Thunderbird 3.03 on Win 7 from Win XP Problem

On my WinXP box, I copied everything in the [randomcharacters].default folder (the actual profile files) to the corresponding profile folder on the Windows 7 box. My Win XP installation does not have a separate folder for Thunderbird in the Application Data\Mozilla folder. The folder structure on that machine is Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles...

I tried MozBackup, but it choked on the profile on the Win XP machine. Following another suggestion in a Mozilla forum, I copied the profile files to the Win 7 machine, used MozBackup to back that set up, deleted the files, opened Thunderbird so that it would create the default files, closed it again and restored the profile files with MozBackup. I got the same results.

Last night, I also compacted all of the mail folders on the Win XP machine, but that didn't seem to make any difference in the size of the files.

FWIW, I did notice that the modified date on most of the mail files was some time during 2007, even though I access them through Thunderbird ever day. It's an interesting correspondence that the visible imported emails on the Windows 7 installation of Thunderbird end with those in 2007.

There doesn't seem to be anything that I've tried so far that will display the most recent emails in the Thunderbird installation on the Windows 7 box, even though all messages are visible on the Windows XP box.

Well that might be the problem, because Thunderbird stores its data in C:\Users\<Your User Name>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird

At least on Win7. You certainly seem competent enough to be able to translate that to it's XP counterpart. But I think the main thing is that it's now it's own subdir, not in the Mozilla subdir tree.

What you're copying is likely some pre-3.0 profile data, hence the 2007 timestamps.

Yes, you're correct on the difference in locations between operating systems. I've been using TBird for a while and I would surmise that it's retained the folder structure throughout the upgrade process.

However, that is the only place on my Win XP box the profiles reside. There is no separate "Thunderbird" folder whatsoever. I checked in the properties for "local directory" while running TBird. It shows C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles etc.

So what now?

Did you copy the profile.ini file? This is what Firefox and Thunderbird read to figure out which profile directory to read.

And by "Local Directory" I assume you mean the field in the account settings dialog box. Which should point to where the files are stored.

The content of Profile.ini depends on the name of the actual profile folder, so copying it from the XP box to the Win 7 installation would not make any difference. The two folders are different names.

You are correct. "Local Directory" is one of the fields in the account settings dialog box.

It looks like TBird is able to use its mail database files without changing the modified date. You are probably correct in noting the correspondence between the modified date and the dates of the visible emails when the profiles are imported. What can I do about this?