Modest Thunderbird trick

So I swapped out my woefully small 30 GB hard drive for a 120 GB hard drive (for my notebook) with a some appreciated help from a good friend. I decided to start fresh rather than copy the old one onto the new.

My problem was, I didn't have the foresight to email myself my essential old emails, like the various keys for unlocking programs. The old drive was in an external enclosure, but how to get to the email files was the problem.

So with the main folder "local folders" selected, I went to edit, properties and and under local folders there is a local directory. This is the directory where the email file is stored. Some of the folders in the path to this directory are hidden, so it takes a little perseverance. Once I found out this, I copied the appropriate files, in my case purchases and purchases.msf, to the new folder and opened up Thunderbird, and there is was.

Just to make sure there wasn't some strange file that I sort of need to copy but didn't copy over also, I copied the emails to a temp file, deleted the now empty file and then renamed the temp file to "purchases".

The last step was probably just paranoia, but it was easy and didn't do any harm.

There might be instructions on how to do this somewhere out there, but I couldn't find them, so I decided at the very least I would post them there in case anyone else finds themselves in the same bind.

Whether they can find this, however, well that's a different question.