Sharing Mozilla Thunderbird profiles in Windows and Linux

[dreas]

Hi there,

a few weeks ago I was assembling my new computer and the new hard drive is already partitioned with an upcoming gentoo installation in mind. It's going to be a dual boot box and currently holds Windows XP only. Yeah, shame on me, but I was waiting for my new graphic card to arrive before going through the whole X configuration thing. Well, not really a big deal, I know, but time is currently sparse. So anyway...

...what I want to achieve is having the same email accounts available whichever OS I boot. Thus I require to share the same profiles in Windows as well as gentoo.

My plan right now is to install Thunderbird on Windows first and set up my email accounts there. Then, after installing Thunderbird on gentoo, I'd mount the Windows partition (NTFS) containing the Thunderbird profile folder (should be at C:\WINDOWS\Anwendungsdaten\Thunderbird\Profiles\default\) and symlink the Thunderbird profile folder in gentoo (should be at ~/.thunderbird/default/) to the mounted Thunderbird profile folder.

What do you think? Will this work out? Or do you have a better idea to achieve shared Thunderbird profiles?
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[NeddySeagoon]

dreas,

NTFS support in linux is somewhat limited. You need to put the shared items on a FAT32 (vfat) partition.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
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[dreas]

[rafael]

If you make a small ext2 partition and mount it to your profile in linux, you could also use ext2fsd to mount the same partition in windows and link your settings folder to that partition.

I hope you understand what I mean.

[Section_8]

I dual boot between win2k/gentoo and use thunderbird to share email between them, but...

AFAIK, linux can't read ntfs partitions, but updating ntfs is "experimental" - I haven't had the guts to try it, but if you do, I would backup everything first.

I don't think you can share the profiles directly - some of the prefs files (prefs.js or user.js I think) have full windows path names (c:\documents ...) in them - I don't know how you could make linux understand them.

What I did was set up a shared FAT32 partition between windows/linux and share email folders and the address book on it, like this:

1) In windows, start tbird with the profile manager and create a new profile on the fat32 partition and tell him to start that profile by default.

2) Copy your existing NTFS profile to the new one. You might rename the old one to be sure it's really running with the new one.

3) Move your email folders to the fat32 partition. In the tbird email account settings, I think under server properties, you can set the full pathname of the email folders. Exit tbird and copy your email folders to the new directory.

4) In linux: start tbird and set the email folders there to the same directory created in step 3 on the fat32 partition.

5) To share address books - in your linux tbird profile, delete or rename the abook.mab file there. Then symlink abook.mab to the abook.mab in your fat32 tbird profile.

HTH

[piquadrat]

[dreas]

[Robaer]

Hi,

I managed this by doing the following trick: I have an NTFS Partition for Windows and a Fat32 for my files. During logon /-off a script copies the neccessary file like the adressbook or filter rules from the sync folder on the Fat32 partition.

It's not a perfect solution, but it works..