I would like to be able view email and addresses on both a wireless laptop (various places in the house) and a wired desktop located in my office. I have researched this idea considerably and it seems to be possible. On the Vista Ultimate desktop which I'll call "Primary", I have moved the TBird profile to a "D" partition and this works fine. On my laptop (XP Pro), I downloaded a full version of TBird and altered the "proflies.ini" file by changing the "IsRelative" to a "0" and "Path" to the folder on the desktop (set up as shared). I can see the desktop folders from the laptop. If I am executing TBird on the laptop and if the desktop has TBird open, I get an error message from TBird telling me that TBird is already running. If I close it on the desktop, I can open TBird on the laptop. It would appear that there should be a way for me to still see, get and send email from either system (regardless of which one is open) since I cannot be in both places at the same time.
Web research seems to iimply that possible use of Thunderbird Portable would allow me the function I want on a laptop. However, Thunderbird Portable installed on the laptop will not retain the location of the TBird Desktop network shared folders in either the Local Folder settings or the Account/Server Settings dialog box. I can change these boxes to the correct shared location but as soon as I close the application to restart it, the settings return to their nornal C:\ etc etc. locations.
I've been struggling with this quite a bit and cannot seem to find a solution. I would really appreciate help from someone who is very familiar with TBird. Thanks.
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I agree with the comments above.
You have a couple of options:
1) If your mail host supports IMAP, pick up mail from both machines with that - both machines will stay in sync with the server
2) If your mail host does not support IMAP, you may need to set up a local machine as a mailserver that picks up mail as Pop3 (fetchmail would work for this - there are probably many out there for windows that do the same thing) and then also runs an IMAP server, that your tbird clients can connect to.
Hope this helps
I can't believe that this is so hard to do. I cannot use IMAP with my ISP. It is not supported. What I don't seem to be able to do is to force a second system (XP Pro in this case) to access the mail and address book stored on the primary (Vista Ultimate). Someone had mentioned that TBird Portable should be able to do this with no problem. Does anyone have experience with Portable? When I change the location of the mail and local folders in Portable, they immediately revert back to their original designation.
I don't really care which app. I use, I just want one of them to work. About 5 days ago, I was able to make this work OK but I cannot reproduce it. Also, it doesn't appear that TBird likes anything other than a mapped drive. Is this correct when attempting to share a file?
Also, it seems very easy to lose all of your mail. I have backup so am not concerned but would like to feel more comfortable when I go "Live". I heard lots of good things about TBird but I haven't found anyone with a great deal of expertise to help. Thanks to all of you for trying. I may be asking too much and may just need to go with something like GMAIL but it will take days for the transfer. I have at least 8 years of Outlook mail and folders that I would need to migrate to GMAIL.
Yes, you can of course use GMail for this. You wil find google's instructions on this here: http://mail.google.com/sup
BTW: Now that I realize it, GMail *does* offer IMAP functionality. So if you first set GMail up so that it fetches your mail using POP3 and then enable IMAP for your GMail account (see http://mail.google.com/sup
Which, I believe, is exactly what you wanted. :)
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by: cyberstalkerPosted on 2009-08-25 at 15:19:17ID: 25182865
Have you tried IMAP? This does exactly what you want, without all the trouble. You don't need shared drives and you can open as many email clients as you want.