Well, a) How often does the average user need to do this? Is the reward/benefit worth the effort needed to implement? b) Such a tool would have to cope with all the vagaries, such as porting the profile to a different version of the same OS, to a different OS, to a different location (D: instead of C:) and last but not least, to a different version of Thunderbird. How should it cope with any add-ons that don't work in the new environment? Just how much hand-holding should it offer? The ImportExportTools add-on has an option for making a backup. Have you looked at that? I have to say I don't know how well it addresses my questions above. One of its downsides is that like any solution based on an add-on , you'd need a working profile and the add-on in place in order to run the add-on to import the profile. Or you need an external stand-alone tool like the defunct MozBackup.