How do I transfer a user's Thunderbird profile from Windows to OSX?

Question

I thought this was simply a matter of doing an effective scp -r user@PC:Application\ Data/Roaming/Thunderbird ~/Library/Application\ Support/

and restarting Thunderbird. But when I do this I get this message:

"Profile Missing

Your Thunderbird profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible."

and TBird refuses to start up.

Here's the profiles.ini file:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/qudsuwtv.default

[Profile1]
Name=Profile-2013-06
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/obq7fvg5.Profile-2013-06

[Profile2]
Name=Profile-2013-06-17
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/xwq4pi1y.Profile-2013-06-17
Default=1

Yes, xwq4pi1y.Profile-2013-06-17 is the current profile. I must have named it that while dealing with a PC->PC upgrade in June '13. Who knows why? I suck at home IT. But it was working. The other two profiles haven't been used since then, but I'm wary of deleting them and angering the profile gods.

I get the same behavior about the missing profile whether I copy PC:AppData/Local/Thunderbird to MAC:~/Library/Caches/.

I also get the same behavior when I start with the profile manager. It gives me two choices "default" and "Default User". Selecting either and pressing "Start Thunderbird" results in the same missing-profile message.

How do I get Thunderbird to see the new profile directories?

I should note that I had successfully copied just the qudsuwtv.default profile over, but was surprised to see that when it started up, it read the current email from the POP3 server, but had no email from 6/2013 to 4/2015. So I had successfully brought up one of the obsolete profiles. I zapped that away, and decided to naively copy the full profile from the PC, not just the mail box I thought my wife was using. So does Thunderbird cache some data in a hidden setting somewhere? I get the same behavior whether I zap ~/Library/AppSupport/Thunderbird or populate it from the PC.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Found the answer: it's ~/Library/Thunderbird, not ~/Library/Application\ Support/Thunderbird. This, of course, is plain wrong, as the ~/Library namespace should be reserved for generic concepts.