using thunderbird for email, importing my old outlook emails, can I run 2 files at once?

I am using gmail for email for a long time, so I downloaded thunderbird to backup my gmail emails.

I use thunderbird to search for emails etc.

On another computer I imported all my old outlook emails into thunderbird.

can I take that file from the other computer and attach it to my other installation of thunderbird so I can search my old outlook emails also on the same computer?

Yes its possible

1) Find the profile folder of the profile containing the Outlook mails (e.g. %AppData%\Thunderbird\Profiles on Windows).

2) Within this profile folder find the files that have the same name as the folders in Thunderbird. There should be one file with this name and one file the ending .msf

for example:
%AppData%\Thunderbird\Profiles\i2m1oyie.default\Mail\Local Folders\mail-dir
%AppData%\Thunderbird\Profiles\i2m1oyie.default\Mail\Local Folders\mail-dir.msf

copy the files without .msf

%AppData%\Thunderbird\Profiles\i2m1oyie.default\Mail\Local Folders\mail-dir

3) Within the other Thunderbird create folders with the same name (e.g. mail-dir)

4) Find this profile folder and replace the copy the files from the "Outlook-Thunderbird" here.

This will integrate your Outlook mails into your existing mail account.

Also see the Mozilla Knowledge Base articles about this topic:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_and_exporting_your_mail
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_folders
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Import_from_Outlook_Express

Yes, there's two ways you can do it:

• Manually copy over the profile data and then hack around some config files.

• Use MozBackup to back up the profile data from one machine and then restore it to the other machine.

In either case I'd recommend backing up your profile data using MozBackup on the machine you're importing to first (and probably back up the profile directories to be doubly safe) just in case.

Using Thunderbird, you can copy your local messages to an IMAP server - just set up an IMAP account in Thunderbird, then drag and drop your messages from Local Folders to the IMAP account. Then, if necessary, repeat in reverse to copy them from the IMAP server on to your other computer.

This might work using GMail as the IMAP account, but I haven't tried that.