How to Export Thunderbird Mail Accounts?

"For each of the accounts, you can zip up the related profile folders to send over and have them set up with the data on their machine.

To find out where the accounts are storing the information, go to:

Tools > Account Settings

Then select the Server Settings pane of an account.

Look at the folder path stored in the Local directory. (If you can't see it all, click browse and a pop up will show you the path of where the folder is.)

Then, follow the path to the folder on your system.

The parent will have the following default child folders:


Drafts.sbd
Inbox.sbd
Sent.sbd
Templates.sbd


Zip it up with your compression/archive tool of choice and email it to the person.

They then extract the folder to a location of their choice or into a similar path as outlined in an earlier step. (Server Settings > Local directory)

They will need to restart Thunderbird for the account manager to remap to the folder.

When setting up Thunderbird, the default Local directory store path is a long chain of folders to where the profile is stored. By setting the folder of choice in the Local directory you can cut that down and even store the information on a different partition or disk.

The above instructions and screenshot are from a Windows XP install of Thunderbird. There might be slight difference on other systems, but the instructions will hold."

Thunderbird stores mail in mbox format, which is pretty universal. You may be able to just send them the mbox file (that the profile uses), if not there's an mbox import/export extension for Thunderbird.