Why Thunderbird Portable

For windows I highly recommend the excellent 'thunderbird portable' which is a self contained thunderbird you can put on a disk/usb stick/network drive or just place it on your computer somewhere.

What is the advantage? Well the program, your email and all the settings are held in a single directory. It's easy to understand and easy to use.

Because this is a portable app you can:

run it off a usb disk (just copy it to a usb drive to take it to another windows machine)
back it up by copying it to somewhere else
easily upgrade your computer (just copy it to a usb disk, reformat/reinstall your computer and copy it back) (It isnt an installed program, everything you need is in that one directory)
move the directory to a laptop while going overseas (just move it back onto your desktop when you get back)

The only gotcha is that you cant run two email clients (ie, this and outlook or this and another thunderbird client). You need to switch all your email to thunderbird (but thats a good idea anyway, thunderbird is much better than free outlook).

I recommend you switch to a thunderbird portable 100% and ditch all other email clients. IE: ONLY use thunderbird portable

Best practice:

use thunderbird portable as your only email client (it does email (pop and imap) and even usenet news (nntp))
back it up regularly (just copy the whole thing onto another disk)
to upgrade:
- backup old ThunderbirdPortable directory (if it goes wrong you can just copy the whole thing back)
- move old directory to ThunderbirdPortable.old
- install new version into same place/name as the old one
- copy the Data/ directory from the backup to the new install
- all done

Just a warning from someone who has done it:

  Dont ever try and manually merge/copy email

  If you copy Thunderbird Portable to your laptop (to go overseas) then
  only use the laptop version until you copy it back to your desktop.

  Never run two different email clients at the same time. Email tends to
  deliver to which ever one reads the email first and merging them back is a
  nightmare.

  *ONLY USE ONE EMAIL CLIENT (or copy of thunderbird portable) AT ANY TIME*

  If you move your thunderbird portable to a laptop then dont use any other
  copy until you finish your trip and move thunderbird portable back to your
  desktop.

Think of this like getting your physical mail picked up by two people who hate each other and wont work together. Each of them keeps checking your letterbox for mail and grabbing anything they find.

Which one picks up any letter is totally random and if Fred picks up the letter then Sally wont ever know about it.

You only want *one* of these people picking up your letters at any time or things will get confused. It is ok to stop one and then start another (moving to your laptop while you go overseas), but having both trying to get your mail will just leave things in a mess.)

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