well, you can do a search for date, then highlight the results and move to a separate folder Then, you can use the importexporttools NG addon to export as an mbox and import as mbox on the other drive OR, you can exit thunderbird after creating the folder and copy from the profile and, after switching to new drive to paste into the profile there. I suggest using the Mail\Local Folders folder.

Those are the basics, but if you need more detail, let me know. They can also be merged into an existing folder, but that's more detail and can get a bit messy, but does work ok for POP.

thanks for this david. i am generally aware of the file structure that thunderbird uses and when i have explored these data files, i have not found individual email files. so where would i target my search?

i don't mind trying to merge them into an existing folder. my email is a set up as POP.

eric

Each message folder is in two parts, such as inbox, inbox.msf, sent, sent.msf. After you do the search and save to a folder, you want to export the folder itself, not individual emails. They will be in the folder. you can ignore copying the msf entries.

so i found inbox, inbox.msf, sent, and sent.msf. these are the folders on my external ssd that have the three months of emails that i want to move to my computer. i found these folders directly by following their path through windows.

you said to do the search and save to a folder. not sure what you mean here.

then you said to export the folder i saved them too. but i am working with these folders at the windows level, not within thunderbird, so how could i export them and to where should i export them?

I have a similar problem that I am trying to work my way through. I tried exporting the local directories as a zip file. The result was not good - it didn't seem to export the full directory structure. So I am following this.

There are add-ins that allow you to remove duplicates from copied folders, but it seems that the information got corrupted in the export process, so I don't recommend that. It has resulted in me having to do some manual de-duplication, which I am not a fan of!

If you are very comfortable with windows file explorer, you can simply copy the inbox and sent and other folders to the Mail\Local Folders in the active profile. A safer way for many is this:

1. install the addon, importexporttools NG
2. highlight Local Folders
3. rightclick and select the importexport option to import mbox
4. now, select one of the desired folders you copied from the other profile
5. repeat for remaining folders

You can merge to another folder by highlighting all messages in the folder, rightclick and select COPY to (not MOVE)

Alternate approach for merging:

1. With thunderbird accessing old profile (and with the importexporttool installed)
2. highlight folder to be merged into another profile
3. rightclick and select the importexport option to export EML files
4. then, highlight the existing folder to which you want to merge in the EML files
5. rightclick and select the importexport option to import EML