Thunderbird saves your personal information such as messages, passwords and user preferences in a set of files called your profile, which is stored in a separate location from the Thunderbird program files. You can have multiple Thunderbird profiles, each containing a separate set of user information. The Profile Manager allows you to create, remove, rename, and switch profiles.
Go to Help > Troubleshooting Information through the Thunderbird hamburger menu or menu bar. If the Thunderbird menu bar is not visible, press the Alt key on your keyboard to temporarily make it visible.
or
On the Troubleshooting Information page that opens, click the about:profiles link.
This will open the About Profiles page shown in the image below.
The following options are available:
To manage profiles, find the profile you want to change and choose from these buttons underneath that profile:
If you have multiple installations of Thunderbird,
see below.
thunderbird -P
-P
, -p
or -ProfileManager
(any of them should work).
If the above instructions do not work or if you have multiple installations of Thunderbird, use the following instructions instead.
Multiple Thunderbird installationsYou can have multiple Thunderbird programs installed in different locations. To start the Profile Manager for a specific Thunderbird installation, replace thunderbird.exe
in the above instructions with the full path to the Thunderbird program, enclose that line in quotes, then add a space followed by -P.
Examples:
Thunderbird (32-bit) on 64-bit Windows"C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe" -P
Thunderbird (32-bit) on 32-bit Windows (or 64-bit Thunderbird on 64-bit Windows)"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe" -P
/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin -P
Note:
If your Thunderbird application is in a location other than
/Applications/Thunderbird.app/
, adjust the entry.
On macOS Sequoia, the thunderbird-bin executable may not exist. If so, use
/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird -P
instead.
Important: There's a space after the path, before-P
(you can use -P
, -p
or -ProfileManager
after the path; any of them should work).Note: You may need to adjust these instructions if Thunderbird is installed in a non-default location (for example, when multiple installations exist).
If Thunderbird is already included in your Linux distribution or if you have installed Thunderbird with the Thunderbird package manager of your Linux distribution:
firefox -P
The P is capitalized. Alternatively, you can use -ProfileManager
instead of -P
.
The Thunderbird Profile Manager (Choose User Profile) window should open.
If the Profile Manager window still does not open, Thunderbird may have been running in the background, even though it was not visible. Close all instances of Thunderbird or restart the computer, and then try again.
Creating a profileAfter starting the Profile Manager as explained above, you can create a new, additional profile as follows:
Warning: If you choose your own folder location for the profile, select a new or empty folder. If you choose a folder that isn't empty and you later remove the profile and choose the Delete Files option, everything inside that folder will be deleted.
You will be taken back to the Profile Manager and the new profile will be listed.
Removing a profileAfter starting the Profile Manager as explained above, you can remove an existing profile as follows:
After starting the Profile Manager as explained above, you can rename a profile as follows:
Note: The folder containing the files for the profile is not renamed.
OptionsThese options are only available when you start the Profile Manager when Thunderbird is closed.
Choosing this option loads the selected profile and starts Thunderbird without connecting to the Internet. You can view previously viewed web pages and experiment with your profile.
Use the selected profile without asking at startupWhen you have multiple profiles, this option tells Thunderbird what to do at every startup:
To copy all of your Thunderbird data and settings to another Thunderbird installation (for example, when you get a new computer), you can make a backup of your Thunderbird profile, then restore it in your new location. For instructions on how to back up and restore a profile, see Backing up a profile. If you need to move your Thunderbird data (accounts, messages, passwords and other data) to a new computer, see Move Thunderbird data to a new computer.
Recovering information from an old profileIf you have important information from an old Thunderbird profile, such as bookmarks, passwords or user preferences, you can transfer that information to a new Thunderbird profile by copying the associated files. For instructions, see Recover important data from an old profile. You can also switch to a previous profile to recover old profile data. See Recover user data missing after Firefox update for details.
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