How to specify an absolute path to a profile in profiles.ini when there is a space in the path?
I have a pretty large Thunderbird email profile on my Windows 10 laptop, which works fine. The profile itself is stored on a different disk partition than the Roaming\Thunderbird folder, so its path is specified as absolute in the profiles.ini (with IsRelative=0). Due to another, apparently unsolvable, problem with my account, I had to create a new user account to which I am migrating all apps and data from the old one by copying to the newly created folders and configuring them if needed.
However, the new user name has a space in it (it is like "FirstName LastName"), whence the absolute path name to that profile looks like "X:\Users\FirstName LastName\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxx.default". But when I specify this path in the profiles.ini and the installs.ini files, Thunderbird fails: if I don't enclose the path in quotes, it launches two executables and then says that another copy is running, and if I put quotes around the path, upon launching it pops open the profile manager which doesn't see this profile, only the (pretty empty) default one.
How do I specify this path in the profiles.ini file? I can't afford to have the profile itself stored in a subdirectory of where profiles.ini is (which would have allowed specifying a relative path).
Thanks!
Todas las respuestas (7)
Use the profile manager or about:profiles to set up a new profile that points to your old profile data and let Thunderbird worry about how to save the information in the profiles.ini file. Since V68 editing the profiles.ini manually is a very bad idea anyway with downgrade protection.
@ Matt : Thanks, but I had tried that too, to no avail: Thunderbird did open that location (where I had put a copy of the "old" profile), BUT didn't show any of the preexisting accounts and contents when I opened it. It looked like a new profile.
To make it clear: the "old" profile is an actual profile (which works fine up to now) in the other Windows user account I am trying to migrate to a new Windows user account. I wonder if there is any information in the Thunderbird profiles that is related to the user account.
What I am now forced to do is reenter the Thunderbird accounts one by one, which is a hassle. I will also have to find a way to copy the local files of Thunderbird in the "old" profile to the new one, and not sure yet it will work.
There was an old bug that might be effecting thing - try rebuilding the global database in that old profile. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/rebuilding-global-database
Thanks, but as I had to get on with it, I changed the path of the Documents directory which is on a different partition than the root of my profile (whence the need of absolute paths) so as it be without a space. Then, quite painstainkingly, I recreacted one by one all the accounts (fortunately, they are all IMAP ones), and it works.
The only thing I have to find out now is how to integrate into this account's Thunderbird the local files I had in the old one.
A bit off topic but I am a new member and can't post a new topic.
I have 3 Thunderbird profiles which I can select from when bringing up the profile manager with thunderbird.exe as my command line
Is there a command line I can use to start one of the profiles directly from my pop-checker? I'm entering thunderbird.exe -P "C:\Users\SERVER\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\workemail.default" but it is bringing up the same profile manager rather than the specific account. What am I doing wrong?
plasman5 said
A bit off topic but I am a new member and can't post a new topic.
Yes you can go here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/new
I have 3 Thunderbird profiles which I can select from when bringing up the profile manager with thunderbird.exe as my command line Is there a command line I can use to start one of the profiles directly from my pop-checker? I'm entering thunderbird.exe -P "C:\Users\SERVER\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\workemail.default" but it is bringing up the same profile manager rather than the specific account. What am I doing wrong?
According to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Line_Options
-p uses profile name as a parameter. -profile uses the path to a profile.
You can most things profile related like switch a default profile and launch them from about:profiles which can be fount in the troubleshooting information.
Matt, Thank you for the information. I got it working! I was trying to use the Profile name that is located at C:\Users\SERVER\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles but I was overthinking it. You simply need to put the name that appears when you run profile manager and put that name in quotes, as in thunderbird.exe -P "Work"
I could not get the -profile "full path" working but the former is much easier...
I appreciate the help very much.