in essence you want to move you profile folder. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_profile_folder_-_Thunderbird

Matt, Thank you for pointing me to the available info on profile folders.

I read different web pages on the site and tried different things. some of them acted as if they were able to connect to the files/folders on the other volume, but Eudora didn't really work on Macs and I had to quit the app. For the moment I have given up. I may have found the code where the profile stuff is done, but given modern coding techniques, without a debugger to trace through the code, one can't really decipher it.

1) Is there anyone in the SF bay area who might be able to give me some

in person help ?

2) the old version of Eudora has problems with some email messages that access files (example: attempted connection to pippio.com:443)

and I get  an Alert dialog with the message :

"Error code: ssl_error_no_cypher_overlap" one or more times. AS I can't do anything about them I would like to eliminate (patch out) the dialog and just live in blissful ignorance. Can anyone point me to the code that issues the dialog ?

I think you are digging perhaps to deep.

Cypher issues are mostly the result of fixes for the various SSL bugs over the past 18 months or so.

Looking at the reports for pippio.com, it looks like they only support TLS. are you configured to connect with TLS? or are your server settings using SSL or SSL/TLS. Hence cypher issues.

At the end of the day all you are trying to do is change the pointer stored in the priofiles.ini file to point to your new location.

Profiles.ini is in the Thunderbird folder in the library on OSX..

he alert dialog happens from all kinds of web sites and is a general problem. As to the security Eudora is using, See attached .jpg, it is set for TLS/SSL, but you have to keep in mind that Eudora was built 4 or more years ago with an older build of Thunderbird ( 19 ? ) and may not incorporate recent fixes. Whom ever was on the project released one version & NO updates :-(

As to the profiles.ini file, I tried all kind of combinations, mainly of the form: MPB/Users/macnosy/<rest ofpathname> also tried: MBP:Users/<pathname>

and also tried using \ It would be nice to know where the code for parsing the pathname is

Try using the Profile Manager. You simply navigate to the data and it fills in the pathname in the appropriate format.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/using-multiple-profiles

I could tell you about Linux and Windows but have exactly zero hands-on experience with OSX. All i can guess is that since it has a lot in common with Linux, you should be using / . In Windows it uses / in the default relative addressing method, and \ in absolute pathnames.

Linux doesn't use drive identifiers either since all this is done via mount points, so my default path would be /home/<user folder>/.thunderbird or more succinctly, ~/.thunderbird

Have you changed IsRelative to 0?

Is : safe in pathnames in your environment? Your account folders are expressed as files in your file system, so folk who put in a / as part of a name run into trouble because this is parsed as a folder/file construction. For the same reason, I would never use ? or * in folder names, and I'm wary of all punctuation marks.

just drop the OSE stuff and use the current Thunderbird. The profiles are the same on the whole. The only major change is with passwords. You may not have them after the change over.

OSE, was under the hood Thunderbird 3.0 IIRC with the Penelope add-on installed.

PLs go back to my original statement. The internal disk (SSD) is divided up into 2 partitions (volumes in Apple terminology) called MBP and MBP_12 which boot into OSX 10.6 & 10.12 respectively. What I want to do is to keep the Profiles folder on the 10.6 volume & somehow convince a copy of Eudora OSE on the 10.12 partition to look for it on the 10.6 volume. That way I can switch between the 2 versions of the OS, but read my email on either one. The newer version has a better browser, but I still have programs on the old one that I use.

When I attended a conference called Hackers last weekend in Santa Cruz CA I was lucky enough to meet one former member of the Mozilla team who gave me the history of Thunderbird and told me that there is an active Mozilla HQ less than 10 miles from me.

In the meantime I did some more looking at various Mozillazine web pages such as : http://kb.mozillazine.org/Bypassing_the_Profile_Manager http://kb.mozillazine.org/Starting_your_Mozilla_application_with_a_specified_profile http://kb.mozillazine.org/Opening_a_new_instance_of_your_Mozilla_application_with_another_profile http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager

and tried some experiments in using the profile manager via the "-P" and "-profile" options without very much success. So MBP has Eudora & the Thunderbird folder in the User library and MBP_12 only has a copy of Eudora on it Remember that Apple uses "/" as a path separator , …

the below experiments I started the Unix Terminal application and entered the commands:

under 10.12

/Applications/Eudora.app/Contents/MacOS/eudora-bin -P "/volumes/MBP/Users/macnosy/Library/Thunderbird" brings up "Choose User Profile" dialog & infinite sequence of error msgs 2016-11-09 22:25:08.609 eudora-bin[7605:26947] Warning: did not get back top right metric 2016-11-09 22:25:08.610 eudora-bin[7605:26947] Warning: did not get back bottom left metric clicking on start Eudora - says profile is in use

under 10.6
   brings up dialog & it runs
   minor msg: Warning: unrecognized command line flag -foreground

under 10.12

/Applications/Eudora.app/Contents/MacOS/eudora-bin -profile "/volumes/MBP/Users/macnosy/Library/Thunderbird" no dialog just 4X pairs of above error msg no more terminal prompts, had to press Ctl-c

under 10.6

brings up dialog for new account setup - didn't find the profile path

under 10.12

/Applications/Eudora.app/Contents/MacOS/eudora-bin -profile "/MBP/Users/macnosy/Library/Thunderbird" no dialog just 4X pairs of above error msg got message that a copy of TB was open did get Terminal prompt under 10.6 get error msg that a copy of TB ((Eudora is open) which is not true As dismissing the message and launching Eudora "normally" works

My conclusion after having used computers as a professional programmer for over 50 years is that there is a problem with the logic inside TB/Eudora which needs to be investigated.

The executable for Eudora OSE is Thunderbird. Not Eudora.

When Thunderbird starts (I use this term with the express intention of not confusing Eudora with what Thunderbird with the Penelope addon does.) It creates a file parent.lock in the profile folder and it's presence will prompt the warning that Thunderbird is open.

The location of the profile is stored in the profiles.ini file. But as you are having issues starting the profile manager I suggest you use the profile switcher add-on to do the business end for you. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/profileswitcher/

With that installed the profile manager has an entry on the file menu.

when setting the location in the profile manager create a new profile in the version you want to change and point the new profiles location to the location of the oringinal you want it to use.

The folder profiles is the root, so the existing profile will be in the profiles folder probably as 8 random numbers and letters followed by .default.

Really I can not offer much help with OSE. I never saw it when it was released, I have never used OSX (Nix yes, NeXt no) and it is so far back in history that there are few involved that even remember it, let alone had anything to do with it.

OSE was a project developed by paid employees of Qualcomm they developed a single version of the Penelope add-on, after which Qualcomm took their paid staff away from the project. As it was a binary add-on it worked only with one version of Thunderbird. I am not even aware of a copy of the add-on source, but one thing I can assure you. No developer is going to offer to fix anything that is wrong with it ever unless you pay them. Hence my recommendation to get off the OSE merry go round and just deal with a current version of Thunderbird.

I'm not sure that you're paying attention to the detail.

-P is used with a profile name. -profile is used with a profile pathname.

In this: /Applications/Eudora.app/Contents/MacOS/eudora-bin -P "/volumes/MBP/Users/macnosy/Library/Thunderbird"

…you have used neither a name nor a pathname.

Finally got Eudora to work with the following Profile.ini file: [General] StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0] Name=default IsRelative=0 Path=/volumes/MBP/Users/macnosy/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/yanbyrra.default Default=1

There are some weirdness on 10.12 . The menu comes up and flashes one or 2 times and in order to get the windows to show up I have to click on the app from the dock or the application folder. Other than that, it appears to work.

I will reply to Matt's comments later I do thank you for your assistance.