Roaming Multi-OS Thunderbird

Happy days.

I just managed to setup a relatively painless way to use Thunderbird as my mail client on both my Ubuntu machine, and a Windows XP laptop.

Background:

Late in 2007 my laptop had a coronary. It's had a long and fruitful life, but was suffering from a cracked mainboard, which caused the occasional instant shutdown if it was flexed at all. The LCD screen backlight was also dead, and I'd been using it with an external monitor (or KVM switch in most cases) for 6 months or more. Oh yeah, it also had a missing₁ "Y" keycap. Since this time I've been using my Gmail account to check my main email address, and a handful of others.

To be honest, I didn't miss application based email all that much, the Gmail interface is pretty good. However, the ability to work off-line is nice, and I'd like to be able to randomly access archived business stuff, and a few other niceties, so I'd always intended to go back to Thunderbird at some point.

Back to the setup...

So firstly I installed Thunderbird onto a functional XP laptop I've been using, and setup Thunderbird to synch with Gmail in IMAP configuration. Gmail checks my other accounts, so I only need one account in Thunderbird. This also means if I'm at some other PC, I can still get to everything using the Gmail web interface. Good instructions for setting up Thunderbird/gmail IMAP can be found at bother lifehacker and google.

Once I was happy with the IMAP synchronisation I took the laptop home. It's worth making sure that you get all the settings just right, so that if you delete something in Thunderbird, it's available in the Gmail web trash bin, and that sort of thing. All the instructions are in the previous 2 links.

On my Ubuntu machine, I installed Thunderbird using Synaptic, and setup a default mail profile with the bare minimum to get it running. I didn't download any mail. Then I:
1. Copied everything from the Windows Thunderbird profile directory into the Ubuntu profile directory under a sensible name. (Here is where to find these directories)
2. Modified the profile.ini file to point to this directory.
3. Started Thunderbird and started using it on Ubuntu.

Actually, I did the transfer via a portable hard disk, and intend to keep doing tis, so that at any given time, there are at least 3 versions of my profile. You can never have too many backups. And, because I'm using Unison to automate all the synchronisation at the Ubuntu end, I've only got to manually copy stuff on the XP machine. I'll probably automate that using SyncBack, now that I come to think of it.

Still todo:

Settle on a contact management tool. I'm considering using my Gmail address book, I believe there are plugins to access it from Thunderbird. I'm not sure about this, I'm more inclined to do something more flexible to solve this problem. Maybe a home Zimbra server is in order.

Footnotes:
1: Not truly missing, it's in a glassine bag in my laptop bag, somewhere.