Can I have two versions of Mozilla Thunderbird on same computer (Windows 10)

Question

I have used Thunderbird for many years, and importantly it includes all emails relating to customers/sales/support ectera and sometimes I need to search through these old emails. But it has got very slow, now when i compose a message ioften have to wait for the text appear. I'm using the latest version and I have trimmed the emails I can remove so I dont see a way to keep the information and make it perform okay.

My idea was to have two Thunderbird installs so I just fire this version with the old emails up when I need to, is that possible or has anyone got a better idea.

Answer 1

My idea was to have two Thunderbird installs so I just fire this version with the old emails up when I need to, is that possible or has anyone got a better idea.

You would first have to install Thunderbird to two different locations. You can then use the Profile Manager, i.e. C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe" -p for each instance to create and select the profile you want to use.

You would need to create a profile for each instance of Thunderbird for this to work.

To create a new profile, click the Create Profile... button. After specifying a name for the profile, you may also specify a custom location for the profile folder (or click Finish to use the default location).

Using Multiple Profiles

Shortcut to a specific profile - It's an article on Firefox but it still applies to Thunderbird.

In theory, you could store the profile directory in the same location as the installation directory if you really wanted to. You might be better off just creating two shortcuts to the same installation, which use different profiles, by using "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe" -P "Default User" for instance.

You could also use portable versions of Thunderbird.