Having tried it, I wanted to import all my Thunderbird email addresses
and emails.

It imported my address book beautifully but I cannot work out how to
bring in the rest.

Am I correct in believing that it uses .thunderbird and its
profiles.ini to store its profiles?

--
Linux Mint 21.1 kernel version 5.15.0-86-generic Cinnamon 5.6.8
AMD Phenom II x4 955 CPU 16Gb Dram 2TB Barracuda

On 10/12/2023 11:17 AM, pinnerite wrote:
> Having tried it, I wanted to import all my Thunderbird email addresses
> and emails.
>
> It imported my address book beautifully but I cannot work out how to
> bring in the rest.
>
> Am I correct in believing that it uses .thunderbird and its
> profiles.ini to store its profiles?
>
> --
> Linux Mint 21.1 kernel version 5.15.0-86-generic Cinnamon 5.6.8
> AMD Phenom II x4 955 CPU 16Gb Dram 2TB Barracuda
>

There is probably more than one pane, to find the Import command.

[Picture]

https://i.postimg.cc/x13ymqhr/thunderbird-tools-import.gif

And yes, of course you can do it at profile level, or even by
editing profiles.ini and making an absolute path reference
to a folder. (Starting thunderbird -p from the shell, allows
you to do that without using text editing of profiles.ini .
That starts the Profile Manager.)

I keep the profile I'm typing this in, in an
unconventional place, and edited profiles.ini to do it.

Just remember that profile folders have "compatibility.ini"
and to go backwards in version (115 to 102), you need to use
a --downgrade directive of some sort, to do it directly. And
I don't think the downgrade option is all that clever.

Import may be roughly the equivalent of downgrade for all
I know, just processing the raw data and bringing it in.

The key3.db and cert8.db may have differences in format or
content, which make going forward or backward difficult,
so you may find you have to re-enter passwords or something.
Depending. Moving in the forward direction (102 to 115)
is going to work with more assurances if juggling profile
folders, than going backwards. Import, I don't expect it
will carry any more information forward, than breaking
the profile by moving backwards.

If you have Thunderbird and Betterbird both installed,
then at a minimum, I would match the versions. Betterbird
should not damage a profile. I suspect the handling is
"intelligent", because I think I've had two Mozilla products
in different locations (one might have been a Nightly),
and the second one was clever enough to create a clean profile
with nothing in it, instead of just jumping in with both feet,
into the other-guys profile. With Profile Manager,
you could point either puppy at a different profile, of your
collection of profiles.

thunderbird -p
betterbird -p

So while a bit of the handling has "awesome automation", it
has all the rough edges of a paper cut. And is bloody annoying.
If you have to keep a state diagram the size of Texas in your
head for this, that's not automation. It's akin to being a
developer class individual.

Now, try and find a list of command line options :-) Good luck.
For example, when starting the Profile Manager, I think you
can pass an absolute path reference. The Mozilla team didn't
really have an intention of becoming "CLI people", so the fact
it accepts CLI arguments, they'd rather not admit that exists
in a sense. They are intense GUI people, and likely no one
on staff has written a really-good CLI utility before. I've seen
other outrageous examples of subject-matter experts who write
utilities, and they haven't a clue what the "expected" options
are (wildcarding FFS). I've lost tooth enamel because of that
(having to use a utility multiple times because it only
processes one file at a time).

Paul