Moving Thunderbird from one mac to another

Question

I'm trying to move my emails and pop3 accounts from one mac (OSX 10.7.5) to a new macbook retina with Mavericks. I've tried following the directions from the Thunderbird knowledgebase, I've tried editing the profiles.ini file by hand. However, perhaps because I have multiple email accounts and lots of sub folders and inboxes, or because the location of the email folder isn't the regular one, nothing seems to copy over everything exactly. I'm wondering if there's a list of ALL file locations for everything Thunderbird related, so that I could clone everything to the new computer?

BTW I can't use Migration Assistant because Apple requires that the old computer also be running Mavericks, then when I tried to upgrade that laptop to Mavericks it crashed with an error about my hard drive and I had to do a full restore.

Answer 1

I succeeded in making the transfer. The key was that each individual email account stores information about where the email related to that account is stored on the hard drive. So it's not enough just to change profiles.ini, you need to sync up where Thunderbird thinks the email account files for each account are stored with where they actually are stored