Sychronizing Thunderbird between Linux and Windows

I am constantly switching between OS’s on my laptop.  I dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux.  I use Thunderbird as my email client for both and got really tired of adding an email account in both places.  Luckily Thunderbird in both Windows and Linux stores profile data in the same format.  Here are the steps I take to copy my profile from my windows partition to my linux profile.

1.)  In your home directory delete .thunderbird (or .mozilla-thunderbird in ubuntu / debian).

2.)  Recreate the appropriate directory (.thunderbird or .mozilla-thunderbird)

3.)  Mount your windows partition

example:  mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/windows

4.)  Now just copy your profile directory from Windows partition into your thunderbird directory.

cp /mnt/windows/Users/randy/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles/mfwx327v.default ~/.thunderbird/

5.)  Now you need to create a “profiles.ini” file in your .thunderbird directory.  Create the file using your favorite editor (I prefer VIM) that contains the following:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1
[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=mfwx327v.default

6.)  Once the “profiles.ini” file is created all you have to do now everytime you want to copy your profile from Windows is repeats steps 3 & 4.

I haven’t tried this in reverse going from Linux to Windows but it should work the same copying your profile directory back to windows.