What will happen to my existing emails if I upgrade from Thunderbird 8 to the latest version?
I currently run Thunderbird 8 on Windows 7, but I'm thinking of switching to Windows 10 and have read that my version of Thunderbird won't be compatible. If I upgrade Thunderbird to, say 38.3 version, will all my existing emails and addresses stay intact or is there something I will have to do to ensure that that is the case? Thanks
All Replies (4)
What is currently your version of Thunderbird?
Who's telling you it is incompatible?
No-one can start answering your somewhat vague question until we know which version you are upgrading from. ;-)
Modified by Zenos
As far as I can gather it's Thunderbird 8
Help|About will tell you version numbers.
I can't recall any specific issues with upgrading from 8 to 38. That's not to say it will be seamless. There are under-the-hood changes that go on and it's quite possible that something required to run an old version won't be there in Windows 10.
I'd suggest:
- back up your profile
- install the latest thunderbird
- see what happens
Hopefully it will just work with your old profile. If not, you could re-install your older version from here:
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/
I don't generally encourage users to stay on obsolete versions. But if you find you hate the new version sufficiently, you could try TB8?? on your new machine.
Your messages, settings etc are stored in your profile. By and large a profile will work with both old and new versions of Thunderbird, but there are occasional step changes and a relevant "in sequence" update would do any necessary conversion. Leap-frogging a large number of versions might miss this step and you end up with a profile that the new version can't work with. But so long as you have the old version and the old profile, you can roll back and no permanent harm is done.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-tb?esab=a&s=profiles&r=1&as=s
Thanks for that, I'll give it a go.