Mozilla Thunderbird Portable is a great invention and I’ve used it for some time, on both Windows and Ubuntu Linux under wine.  While it works just fine for email, the whole integration thing was lacking under Ubuntu.  The things like opening attachments and clicking links didn’t work under Linux.  A small price to pay to have all your mail show up in your inbox, just as you left it, regardless which OS you choose to boot at the time (Especially when I was using POP).  But why pay that price if you don’t have to?

I use gmail behind the scenes for my mail, and use the IMAP feature to keep my inbox sync’d.  This means that all my mail is there, even if I just use two separate installs of Thunderbird.  But it also means you have to re-download messages, and waste twice the disc space, and time, and bandwidth (especially precious if you’re on mobile broadband).  Plus, keeping a backup copy is easy, as the files stay in the portable format, just drag and drop the folder to somewhere else.

So this is how I worked it out, many months later than I would have liked.  I keep this here in case I need to do it again sometime.

Tech Warning: there is jargon and commands behind this link!

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Tags: Tech by David Graff
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