How to Migrate Settings to a New Profile : Postbox Support

Postbox Help/Postbox Help/Knowledge Base + Trouble-Shooting

How to Migrate Settings to a New Profile

Postbox Support
posted this on March 27, 2012 10:54 am

Overview

Here's how to migrate the following settings from an old profile to a new profile:

IMAP Mail
POP Mail
Local Folders
Postbox Address Books
Signatures, Responses, and Topics

At this time we do not have a recommended way to migrate your message Filters.

Locate your Profile Folders

We will refer to your Postbox and Profile folders often. Here is where they are located:

On Mac OS X:
~[your home folder]/Library/Application Support/Postbox/Profiles

(Note: In Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" the Library folder is hidden. To access it, Open Finder, and hold the Option key while clicking on the Go menu at the top of the screen. "Library" will be one of the options. Additionally, to unhide it permanently, open a Terminal window and type: chflags nohidden /Users/[username]/Library )

On Windows Vista, Windows 7:
Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Postbox\Profiles

(Note: The AppData folder is folder is a hidden folder; to show hidden folders, open a Windows Explorer window and choose "Organize --> Folder and Search Options --> Folder Options --> View (tab) --> Show hidden files and folders".)

Make a Backup!

As a precaution, COPY your Postbox folder to the desktop (or another safe place) so that we have a backup just in case.

IMAP Mail

For IMAP Mail, there's really no migration necessary. Simply add your IMAP accounts and all of your mail folders will download automatically.

(NOTE: We do NOT recommend copying your ImapMail folder from one Postbox profile to another, as this could cause a LOT of problems!)

POP Mail

1) Within your OLD Postbox profile, download any new messages you may have waiting for you in your POP accounts.

2) Quit Postbox and startup in your NEW Profile.

3) Setup each of your POP accounts from scratch.

4) Quit Postbox

5) Find the Profiles folder on your computer. Within each profile you will see a folder called Mail, and within that folder you'll see folders for each POP account, for example, pop3.live.com.

Copy the contents of the folder (not the folder itself) from the OLD profile into the corresponding account folder on the NEW profile, excluding these two files: msgFilterRules.dat and popstate.dat.

Within each account folder in your NEW profile, if you see the files msgFilterRules.dat and popstate.dat, please delete them.

6) Start Postbox.

Note: We always recommend IMAP over POP.

Local Folders

1) Quit Postbox

2) Find the Profiles folder on your computer. Within each profile you will see a folder called Mail, and within that folder you'll see a folder called Local Folders.

3) COPY the contents of Local Folders (not the folder itself) from the OLD profile to corresponding location in the NEW profile.

4) Start Postbox.

Note: We always recommend keeping mail in IMAP accounts.

Postbox Address Books

1) Quit Postbox

2) Find the Profiles folder on your computer. COPY the abook.mab file from the OLD profile to the corresponding location in the NEW profile.

3) Start Postbox.

Signatures, Responses, and Topics

1) First, Quit or Exit the Postbox application.

2) Find the Profiles folder on your computer.

3) Within each profile folder your preference settings are contained within a file called prefs.js. To migrate your Signatures, Responses, and Topics from one profile to the next, you'll want to simply copy and replace the preferences entries from within one prefs.js file to the next.

IMPORTANT: You need to modify the contents of prefs.js within the file itself, do NOT copy the whole prefs.js file in its entirety from one profile to the next!

Here are what the preferences look like within prefs.js. Note that multiple lines may be required for each entry. In the examples below, we're are looking at preferences for one signature, one response, and one topic.

Signatures

user_pref("pb.signatures.sigKey0.body", "\nThis is the body of the signature.
\n");
user_pref("pb.signatures.sigKey0.deleted", false);
user_pref("pb.signatures.sigKey0.name", "Default Signature");

Responses

user_pref("pb.responses.cannedResponseKey0.body", "\nThis is the body of the response.
\n");
user_pref("pb.responses.cannedResponseKey0.deleted", false);
user_pref("pb.responses.cannedResponseKey0.name", "My Response");

Topics

user_pref("mailnews.tags.my_topic.active", false);
user_pref("mailnews.tags.my_topic.color", "#000000");
user_pref("mailnews.tags.my_topic.ordinal", "1");
user_pref("mailnews.tags.my_topic.tag", "My Topic");

4) Find and replace the corresponding entries from one within one prefs.js file to another. When the settings have been copied over, save your prefs.js files.

5) Start Postbox.