Our most popular extension is importexporttools https://addons.mozilla.org/de/thunderbird/addon/324492 . Indeed, if you buy another computer and want to move Thunderbird to the new computer, that's the best approach, to export the profile, pack it up in a ZIP, then extract it on the new machine and add it to profiles there. It's trivial for us, but it requires editing profiles.ini and stuff, possibly adapting directory paths, and users shouldn't have to do that. That's the gap that this profile fills. It's also useful to make backups. No backup, no mercy, right? How does Thunderbird support backups? The Thunderbird profile is probably the most valuable asset in the Windows AppData folder. The AppData folders are usually completely cluttered with useless nonsense, and AppData is not even accessible for users in Windows, unless you change well-hidden settings. A common user normally only needs to back her files (photos, Word documents etc.), and her emails. So, Thunderbird should support to make specific backups of our users emails. For both of these reasons, and probably a number of other important use cases where you want to take your emails with you, importing and exporting profiles including emails in local folders should be core functionality. importexporttools provides this functionality. We should either integrate it into Thunderbird, if the code is good, or rewrite the parts that can be simplified or made more reliable.

On 07-Dec-17 9:13 AM, Ben Bucksch wrote: > > Our most popular extension is importexporttools > https://addons.mozilla.org/de/thunderbird/addon/324492 . As a corollary to that I think we should look at the profile switch add-on also from the same author.  It removes the need for the arcane command line switches to change or open the profile manager or another profile.  Outlook express had this functionality 20 years ago and users expect user interface wizards to get things done,  not command line arguments.  Regardless of how useful and powerful they can be. With regard to the import export tools,  my understanding is they are prone to timeouts when processing large folders.  I have never looked, but I assume loops in there somewhere. Matt

Matt Harris wrote on 07.12.17 08:11: > With regard to the import export tools,  my understanding is they are > prone to timeouts when processing large folders.  I have never looked, > but I assume loops in there somewhere. Could well be, if it's doing the zipping or copying either in JS or in a syncronous way on the UI thread. File operations should be async. Ben