Last time that I faced this task, I was just trying to migrate a thunderbird
profile into icedove, which I barely accomplished by deleting my profiles.ini
file in the .icedove folder.
Now I'm trying to consolidate various profiles from email accounts salvaged
from HDD's extracted from defunct computers.
My .icedove folder contains five profile folders, and I want to look into
each one in succession in order to glean the emails that are missing from my
preferred profile. That I intend to do my moving the emails that I've
gleaned into Other Mail folders which I can then copy & paste into the Other
Mail folder of my preferred profile.
Problem is that icedove has a one-way street in this process: as soon as I
rename or delete the profiles.ini file, I have to start over when I attempt
to start icedove, and I'm faced with an un-navigable series of choices whicdh
I can only guess at, which creates one new profile after each attempt, and no
choice ever presented of the five existing profiles.
I do not want to merge the five profiles; that would be a disaster, as
multiple GB are involved, and I would end up with many copies of emails from
the inevitable overlaps.
Can't I just include the profile name with the icedove start command ?
Syntax ? Guessing has too many options and too many pitfalls.
I just tried renaming all but the most important of the five pertinent
profiles from *.default to *.username01, *.username02, ... *.username04,
with no useful effect. I'm presented with a blank list of existing profiles,
and choosing "rename profile" causes the profile manager to just ignore me;
any continuation produces yet another empty profile.
The various how-to's that make any sense all assume a Windows operating
system.
