Source: http://kb.iu.edu/data/ahic.html#fire35w

Rewriting with .htaccess

Routing requests

Again, these rules direct all requests to index.php, except specified file types:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule !\.(js|ico|txt|gif|jpg|png|css)$ index.php

Handling file and directory exceptions

These rules (used immediately prior to the RewriteRule above) exclude real files and directories from the rewriting and lets them pass through unaffected:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

You can also simply allow a specified group of files to pass through unaffected by using this line:

RewriteRule  ^(foo|bar).*  - [L]

In this case, files foo.* and bar.* will be accessed normally.

For more information, see Jayson Minard’s Blueprint for PHP Applications: Bootstrapping.

source: http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/sitemanagement/urlrewriting.html

URL Rewriting

by Ross Shannon

The Apache server’s mod_rewrite module gives you the ability to transparently redirect one URL to another, without the user’s knowledge. This opens up all sorts of possibilities, from simply redirecting old URLs to new addresses, to cleaning up the ‘dirty’ URLs coming from a poor publishing system — giving you URLs that are friendlier to both readers and search engines.

An Introduction to Rewriting

Readable URLs are nice. A well designed website will have a logical file system layout, with smart folder and file names, and as many implementation details left out as possible. In the most well designed sites, readers can guess at filenames with a high level of success.

However, there are some cases when the best possible information design can’t stop your site’s URLs from being nigh-on impossible to use. For instance, you may be using a Content Management System that serves out URLs that look something like

http://www.example.com/viewcatalog.asp?category=hats&prodID=53

This is a horrible URL, but it and its brethren are becoming increasingly prevalent in these days of dynamically-generated pages. There are a number of problems with an URL of this kind:

• It exposes the underlying technology of the website (in this case ASP). This can give potential hackers clues as to what type of data they should send along with the query string to perform a ‘front-door’ attack on the site. Information like this shouldn’t be given away if you can help it.

  Even if you’re not overly concerned with the security of your site, the technology you’re using is at best irrelevant — and at worst a source of confusion — to your readers, so it should be hidden from them if possible.

  Also, if at some point in the future you decide to change the language that your site is based on (to » PHP, for instance); all your old URLs will stop working. This is a pretty serious problem, as anyone who has tackled a full-on site rewrite will attest.

• The URL is littered with awkward punctuation, like the question mark and ampersand. Those & characters, in particular, are problematic because if another webmaster links to this page using that URL, the un-escaped ampersands will mess up their XHTML conformance. They will have to laboriously replace all the ampersands with & character entities, which is often forgotten.
• Some search engines won’t index pages which they think are generated dynamically. They’ll see that question mark in the URL and just turn their asses around.

Luckily, using rewriting, we can clean up this URL to something far more manageable. For example, we could map it to

http://www.example.com/catalog/hats/53/

Much better. This URL is more logical, readable and memorable, and will be picked up by all search engines. The faux-directories are short and descriptive. Importantly, it looks more permanent.

To use mod_rewrite, you supply it with the link text you want the server to match, and the real URLs that these URLs will be redirected to. The URLs to be matched can be straight file addresses, which will match one file, or they can be regular expressions, which will match many files.

Basic Rewriting

Some servers will not have » mod_rewrite enabled by default. As long as the » module is present in the installation, you can enable it simply by starting a .htaccess file with the command

RewriteEngine on

Put this .htaccess file in your root so that rewriting is enabled throughout your site. You only need to write this line once per .htaccess file.

Basic Redirects

We’ll start off with a straight redirect; as if you had moved a file to a new location and want all links to the old location to be forwarded to the new location. Though you shouldn’t really ever » move a file once it has been placed on the web; at least when you simply have to, you can do your best to stop any old links from breaking.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^old\.html$ new.html

Though this is the simplest example possible, it may throw a few people off. The structure of the ‘old’ URL is the only difficult part in this RewriteRule. There are three special characters in there.

• The caret, ^, signifies the start of an URL, under the current directory. This directory is whatever directory the .htaccess file is in. You’ll start almost all matches with a caret.
• The dollar sign, $, signifies the end of the string to be matched. You should add this in to stop your rules matching the first part of longer URLs.
• The period or dot before the file extension is a special character in regular expressions, and would mean something special if we didn’t escape it with the backslash, which tells Apache to treat it as a normal character.

So, this rule will make your server transparently redirect from old.html to the new.html page. Your reader will have no idea that it happened, and it’s pretty much instantaneous.

Forcing New Requests

Sometimes you do want your readers to know a redirect has occurred, and can do this by forcing a new HTTP request for the new page. This will make the browser load up the new page as if it was the page originally requested, and the location bar will change to show the URL of the new page. All you need to do is turn on the [R] flag, by appending it to the rule:

RewriteRule ^old\.html$ new.html [R]

Using Regular Expressions

Now we get on to the really useful stuff. The power of mod_rewrite comes at the expense of complexity. If this is your first encounter with regular expressions, you may find them to be a tough nut to crack, but the options they afford you are well worth the slog. I’ll be providing plenty of examples to guide you through the basics here.

Using regular expressions you can have your rules matching a set of URLs at a time, and mass-redirect them to their actual pages. Take this rule;

RewriteRule ^products/([0-9][0-9])/$ /productinfo.php?prodID=$1

This will match any URLs that start with ‘products/’, followed by any two digits, followed by a forward slash. For example, this rule will match an URL like products/12/ or products/99/, and redirect it to the PHP page.

The parts in square brackets are called ranges. In this case we’re allowing anything in the range 0-9, which is any digit. Other ranges would be [A-Z], which is any uppercase letter; [a-z], any lowercase letter; and [A-Za-z], any letter in either case.

We have encased the regular expression part of the URL in parentheses, because we want to store whatever value was found here for later use. In this case we’re sending this value to a PHP page as an argument. Once we have a value in parentheses we can use it through what’s called a back-reference. Each of the parts you’ve placed in parentheses are given an index, starting with one. So, the first back-reference is $1, the third is $3 etc.

Thus, once the redirect is done, the page loaded in the readers’ browser will be something like productinfo.php?prodID=12 or something similar. Of course, we’re keeping this true URL secret from the reader, because it likely ain’t the prettiest thing they’ll see all day.

Multiple Redirects

If your site visitor had entered something like products/12, the rule above won’t do a redirect, as the slash at the end is missing. To promote good URL writing, we’ll take care of this by doing a direct redirect to the same URL with the slash appended.

RewriteRule ^products/([0-9][0-9])$ /products/$1/ [R]

Multiple redirects in the same .htaccess file can be applied in sequence, which is what we’re doing here. This rule is added before the one we did above, like so:

RewriteRule ^products/([0-9][0-9])$ /products/$1/ [R]
RewriteRule ^products/([0-9][0-9])/$ /productinfo.php?prodID=$1

Thus, if the user types in the URL products/12, our first rule kicks in, rewriting the URL to include the trailing slash, and doing a new request for products/12/ so the user can see that we likes our trailing slashes around here. Then the second rule has something to match, and transparently redirects this URL to productinfo.php?prodID=12. Slick.

Match Modifiers

You can expand your regular expression patterns by adding some modifier characters, which allow you to match URLs with an indefinite number of characters. In our examples above, we were only allowing two numbers after products. This isn’t the most expandable solution, as if the shop ever grew beyond these initial confines of 99 products and created the URL productinfo.php?prodID=100, our rules would cease to match this URL.

So, instead of hard-coding a set number of digits to look for, we’ll work in some room to grow by allowing any number of characters to be entered. The rule below does just that:

RewriteRule ^products/([0-9]+)$ /products/$1/ [R]

Note the plus sign (+) that has snuck in there. This modifier changes whatever comes directly before it, by saying ‘one or more of the preceding character or range.’ In this case it means that the rule will match any URL that starts with products/ and ends with at least one digit. So this’ll match both products/1 and products/1000.

Other match modifiers that can be used in the same way are the asterisk, *, which means ‘zero or more of the preceding character or range’, and the question mark, ?, which means ‘zero or only one of the preceding character or range.’

Adding Guessable URLs

Using these simple commands you can set up a slew of ‘shortcut URLs’ that you think visitors will likely try to enter to get to pages they know exist on your site. For example, I’d imagine a lot of visitors try jumping straight into our stylesheets section by typing the URL http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/css/. We can catch these cases, and hopefully alert the reader to the correct address by updating their location bar once the redirect is done with these lines:

RewriteRule ^css(/)?$ /stylesheets/ [R]

The simple regular expression in this rule allows it to match the css URL with or without a trailing slash. The question mark means ‘zero or one of the preceding character or range’ — in other words either yourhtmlsource.com/css or yourhtmlsource.com/css/ will both be taken care of by this one rule.

This approach means less confusing 404 errors for your readers, and a site that seems to run a whole lot smoother all ’round.

Source: http://roshanbh.com.np/2008/03/url-rewriting-examples-htaccess.html

If you are looking for the examples of URL rewriting then this post might be useful for you. In this post, I’ve given five useful examples of URL rewriting using .htacess. If you don’t know something about url rewriting then please check my older post about url rewriting using .htaccess.

Now let’s look at the examples

1)Rewriting product.php?id=12 to product-12.html

It is a simple redirection in which .php extension is hidden from the browser’s address bar and dynamic url (containing “?” character) is converted into a static URL.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^product-([0-9]+)\.html$ product.php?id=$1

2) Rewriting product.php?id=12 to product/ipod-nano/12.html

SEO expert always suggest to display the main keyword in the URL. In the following URL rewriting technique you can display the name of the product in URL.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^product/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/([0-9]+)\.html$ product.php?id=$2

3) Redirecting non www URL to www URL

If you type yahoo.com in browser it will be redirected to www.yahoo.com. If you want to do same with your website then put the following code to .htaccess file. What is benefit of this kind of redirection?? Please check the post about SEO friendly redirect (301) redirect in php and .htaccess.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^optimaxwebsolutions\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.optimaxwebsolutions.com/$1 [R=301,L]

4) Rewriting yoursite.com/user.php?username=xyz to yoursite.com/xyz

Have you checked zorpia.com.If you type http://zorpia.com/roshanbh233 in browser you can see my profile over there. If you want to do the same kind of redirection i.e http://yoursite.com/xyz to http://yoursite.com/user.php?username=xyz then you can add the following code to the .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ user.php?username=$1
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/$ user.php?username=$1

5) Redirecting the domain to a new subfolder of inside public_html.

Suppose the you’ve redeveloped your site and all the new development reside inside the “new” folder of inside root folder.Then the new development of the website can be accessed like “test.com/new”. Now moving these files to the root folder can be a hectic process so you can create the following code inside the .htaccess file and place it under the root folder of the website. In result, www.test.com point out to the files inside “new” folder.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^test\.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.test\.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/new/
RewriteRule (.*) /new/$1

.

Source: http://roshanbh.com.np/2008/02/hide-php-url-rewriting-htaccess.html

Last time I’ve written an article about hiding php file extension where I’ve showed you how you can use .html or .asp extension of file instead of .php extension. But there was one flaw in that technique you have had to change the file extension explicitly but in this post I’m going to show you how to rewrite the URL instead of renaming the file extension Using this technique you will see product.html in the address bar of the browser but the actual file name remains product.php and you don’t need to rename the file extension. Furthermore you can rewrite the URL like product.php?id=5 to product-5.html.

what is the benefits of rewriting URL?

When a search engine visits the dynamic url like product.php?id=5 it does not give much importance to that URL as search engine sees “?” sign treat it as a url which keeps on changing. so we’re converting the dynamic URL like the product.php?id=5 to static url format like product-5.html. We’ll rewrite the url in such a way that in browser’s address bar it will display as a product-5.html but it actually calls the file product.php?id=5. So that why these kind of URL also named as SEO friendly URL.

what is required for URL rewriting ??

To rewrite the URL you must have the mod_rewrite module must be loaded in apache server. And furthermore, FollowSymLinks options also need to be enabled otherwise you may encounter 500 Internal Sever Error. If you don’t know much about mod_rewrite module then please check this post to know how to check and enable mod_rewrite module in apache?

Examples of url rewriting for seo friendly URL

For rewriting the URL, you should create a .htaccess file in the root folder of your web directory. And have to put the following codes as your requirement.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.htm$ $1.php [nc]

The following example will rewrite the test.php to test.html i.e when a URL like http://localhost/test.htm is called in address bar it calls the file test.php. As you can see the regular expression in first part of the RewriteRule command and $1 represents the first regular expression of the part of the RewriteRule and [nc] means not case sensitive.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^product-([0-9]+)\.html$ products.php?id=$1

The following example will rewrite the product.php?id=5 to porduct-5.html i.e when a URL like http://localhost/product-5.html calls product.php?id=5 automatically.

Source: http://maximumpcguides.com 

Stop a Program from Gaining Unsolicited Internet Access

1. Open Control Panel in the Start menu.
2. Open Windows Firewall in the Control Panel. 
    

   
   

3. Note: If Windows Firewall is not available, change View by to Large icons at the top right of the Control Panel.

4. Select Allow a program or feature through Windows Firewall in the left column of the Windows Firewall window.

   

    

5. Click the Change settings button in the Allowed Programs window.

   
   

    

6. Uncheck the program or feature and then click OK to save the changes.

   
   

    

Stop an Unlisted Program from Gaining Unsolicited Internet Access

What if the program I want to block using the Windows 7 firewall is not listed?

1. Follow the steps above.
2. When you get to the last step (above) click the Allow another program button.
3. Select the program from the Add a Program list or click Browse to find it and then click Add.

   

4. Uncheck the program and then click OK to save the settings.

   

Source: WordPress Blog

I want to make you mine, all the time… oh wait. Hello. I’m here on behalf of the entire WordPress development team and community to announce the immediate availability of WordPress version 2.9 “Carmen” named in honor of magical jazz vocalist Carmen McRae (whom we’ve added to our Last.fm WP release station). You can upgrade easily from your Dashboard by going to Tools > Upgrade, or you can download from WordPress.org. And of course, it wouldn’t be a major release without a short video summarizing some of the cool things about the new version:

The coolest new stuff from a user point of view is:

1. Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

2.9 provides the smoothest ride yet because of a number of improvements under the hood and more subtle improvements you’ll begin to appreciate once you’ve been around the block a few times. Here’s just a sampling:

• We now have rel=canonical support for better SEO.
• There is automatic database optimization support, which you can enable in your wp-config.php file by adding define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);.
• Themes can register “post thumbnails” which allow them to attach an image to the post, especially useful for magazine-style themes.
• A new commentmeta table that allows arbitrary key/value pairs to be attached to comments, just like posts, so you can now expand greatly what you can do in the comment framework.
• Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment. (More of this planned for 3.0.)
• You can set custom theme directories, so a plugin can register a theme to be bundled with it or you can have multiple shared theme directories on your server.
• We’ve upgraded TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing and Simplepie.
• Sidebars can now have descriptions so it’s more obvious what and where they do what they do.
• Specify category templates not just by ID, like before, but by slug, which will make it easier for theme developers to do custom things with categories — like post types!
• Registration and profiles are now extensible to allow you to collect things more easily, like a user’s Twitter account or any other fields you can imagine.
• The XML-RPC API has been extended to allow changing the user registration option. We fixed some Atom API attachment issues.
• Create custom galleries with the new include and exclude attributes that allow you to pull attachments from any post, not just the current one.
• When you’re editing files in the theme and plugin editors it remembers your location and takes you back to that line after you save. (Thank goodness!!!)
• The Press This bookmarklet has been improved and is faster than ever; give it a try for on-the-fly blogging from wherever you are on the internet.
• Custom taxonomies are now included in the WXR export file and imported correctly.
• Better hooks and filters for excerpts, smilies, HTTP requests, user profiles, author links, taxonomies, SSL support, tag clouds, query_posts and WP_Query

All of this and more is reflected in the over 500 tickets, bugs, and enhancements that WP developers in this release cycle.

This release included code from over 140 contributors, here’s everyone we were able to identify: aaroncampbell (Aaron Campbell), abackstrom (Adam Backstrom), aldenta (John Ford), alexkingorg (Alex King), [amilanov], antonylesuisse (Antony Lesuisse), apeatling (Andy Peatling), apokalyptik (Demitrious Kelly), arena (André Renaut), batmoo (Mohammad Jangda), Ben Dunkle, BenBE1987, Benjamin Flesch, bookchiq (Sarah Lewis), brianwhite, c0nstruct, caesarsgrunt (Caesar Schinas), CalebKniffen (Caleb Kniffen), chrisbliss18, chrisscott (Chris Scott), christoph179, coffee2code (Scott Reilly), [cross country flight], Curioso, davecpage (Dave Page), dcole07 (Dan Cole), dd32 (Dion Hulse), demetris (???????? ???????), Denis-de-Bernardy, dj-wp, dwright, eddieringle (Eddie Ringle), error (Michael Hampton), ewestp, fabifott, filosofo (Austin Matzko), greenshady (Justin Tadlock), gsnedders/link92 (Geoffrey Sneddon), hailin (Hailin Wu), hakre, hanilovesme, Harald Nesland, harrym, holizz (Tom Adams), ikonst, jacobsantos (Jacob Santos), janeforshort (Jane Wells), jamescollins (James Collins), jdub (Jeff Waugh), jeff_ (Jean-François “Jeff” VIAL), jeremyclarke (Jeremy Clarke), JeremyVisser (Jeremy Visser), jikamens, jmulley, Joern_W, johanee (Johan Eenfeldt), johnbillion (John Blackbourn), johnjamesjacoby (John James Jacoby), johnjosephbachir (John Joseph Bachir), JonathanRogers, joostdevalk (Joost de Valk), Jose Carlos Norte, josephscott (Joseph Scott), junsuijin, kevinB (Kevin Behrens), kometbomb, lilyfan (IKEDA Yuriko), [lostinlafayette], madhyde, MattyRob, mdawaffe (Michael Adams), Mittineague, miqrogroove, morfiusx, mrmist (David McFarlane), mtdewvirus (Nick Momrik), mysz, nacin (Andrew Nacin), nanochrome, nao (Naoko McCracken), nathanrice (Nathan Rice), nbachiyski (??????? ????????), niallkennedy (Niall Kennedy), nickohrn (Nick Ohrn), ninjaWR (Ryan Murphy), noel (Noël Jackson), Otto42 (Samuel Wood), pairg, peaceablewhale (Franklin Tse), prettyboymp (Michael Pretty), ProDevStudio, ramiy, redsweater (Daniel Jalkut), ruslany, sambauers (Sam Bauers), scribu, Sewar, Simek, simonwheatley (Simon Wheatley), sirzooro (Daniel Fru?y?ski), sivel (Matt Martz), skeltoac (Andy Skelton), snakefoot, stephanreiter (Stephan Reiter), strider72 (Stephen Rider), taco1991, takayukister (Takayuki Miyoshi), tellyworth, tenpura, usermrpapa, utkarsh, Viper007Bond, vladimir_kolesnikov (Vladimir Kolesnikov), VoxPelli (Pelle Wessman), [voyou1], wahgnube, waltervos, westonruter (Weston Ruter), wnorris (Will Norris), xenlab (Eric Marden), yoavf (Yoav Farhi). Wowza!

2.9 has been an exciting development cycle, and I must say it has whetted our appetite for 3.0, which is coming next (probably this spring) and will include at the very least the merge of MU with the WordPress core, and a new default theme. We can’t wait to start working on it.

Source: Wprdpress Blog

The latest and greatest version of WordPress, version 2.8 “Baker,” is immediately available for download. 2.8 represents a nice fit and finish release for WordPress with improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. We also fixed over 790 bugs. This release is named in honor of noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker. Here’s a quick video overview of everything in the new release:

The first thing you’ll notice is that visually 2.8 feels a lot like 2.7, just with some minor tweaks here and there. However once you’ll dig in you’ll begin to appreciate the changes.

Major New Improvements

First and foremost, 2.8 is way faster to use. We’ve changed the way WordPress does style and scripting.

The core and plugin updaters in previous versions of WordPress have been such a success we decided to bring the same to themes. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. Also there is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.

If you were ever frustrated with widgets before, this release should be your savior. We’ve completely redesigned the widgets interface (which we didn’t have time to in 2.7) to allow you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. Developers now have access to a much cleaner and robust API for creating widgets as well.

Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page. It’s the tab in the top right. Now, for example, if you have a wide monitor you could set up your dashboard to have four columns of widgets instead of the two it has by default. On other pages you can change how many items show per page.

And Even More

You can read the full list of over 180 new features, changes, upgrades, and improvements on the Codex. The list is exhausting!

The Future

We’re already thinking hard about the next versions, 2.9 and 3.0. Keep an eye out for improved media handling, better dependency checking, versioning of templates and themes, and of course the fabled merging of WordPress and MU announced at WordCamp San Francisco two weeks ago.

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/export-outlook-email-to-gmail-pst-backup/1938/

Sachin writes – “I have few thousand email messages inside Microsoft Outlook (a pst file) organized in various folders. I know it is possible to download emails from Gmail to Outlook using POP3 or IMAP but is the reverse path possible.”

Sachin is looking for a trick to archive all Outlook email messages (and folders) to his online Gmail account for two reasons – one is secure backup and two, he will be able to access his old emails from any computer.

Solution: It is quite easy to transfer Outlook emails to your Gmail mailbox. Here’s a step by step guide:

Step 1: Enable IMAP in your Gmail account and then configure Outlook (or Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail) to sync with your Gmail address via IMAP. Read this guide.

Step 2: Import your Outlook PST file into a Personal folder that is different from your default Gmail Inbox.

To import, click File -> Import And Export -> Import from another program or file. -> Next -> Personal Folder File (.pst) -> Next.

Select the PST file that contains your email, then pick the email folders that you want to import in Outlook and click Finish.

Step 3: Select the Personal folders that you want to backup online and copy them your Gmail Folder in Outlook (see screenshot).

In the Folder List, right-click the folder you want to copy and click Copy Folder name. Click the Gmail Folder in Outlook to copy that folder in that location. You can repeat the steps as needed for other folders.

That’s it. Your Outlook email will soon become available inside your online Gmail Inbox.

If your switching from Hotmail to Gmail, check this tutorial on moving emails from Hotmail to Gmail.

Caution: The migration from Outlook to Gmail can take a long time if you have very large Outlook pst file or if your internet connection speed is slow. Therefore, consider removing all large emails before moving them to your Gmail via IMAP.

Source: http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/profile

Mozilla Thunderbird stores all your personal settings, such as your mail, passwords and extensions, in a profile. The profile is stored on your hard drive in a profile folder.

If you run into problems using Thunderbird (e.g. problems starting after installing an extension, or other features not functioning properly), the first thing you’re usually asked to do in the tech support forum is to create a new profile. This tutorial will not only show you how to do that, but also how to create backups and move or restore existing profiles.

Contents

• Locate your profile folder
• Create a new profile
• Backing up your profile
• Move an existing profile or restore a backed up profile

Locate your profile folder

Knowing where your profile folder is stored can be useful if, for example, you want to make a backup of your personal data.

• On Windows Vista/XP/2000, the path is usually %AppData%\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\, where xxxxxxxx is a random string of 8 characters. Just browse to C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\ on Windows XP/2000 or C:\users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\ on Windows Vista, and the rest should be obvious.
• On Windows 95/98/Me, the path is usually C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
• On Linux, the path is usually ~/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxx.default/
• On Mac OS X, the path is usually ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/

%AppData% is a shorthand for the Application Data path on Windows 2000/XP/Vista. To use it, click Start > Run… (use the search box on Vista), enter %AppData% and press Enter. You will be taken to the "real" folder, which is normally C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data on Windows XP/2000, C:\users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming on Windows Vista.

Create a new profile

The screenshots are from Firefox, but the appearance is the same in Thunderbird.

In order to create a new profile, you use the Profile Manager. To start the Profile Manager in Windows, follow these steps:

1. Close Thunderbird completely (select File > Exit from the main menu of Thunderbird).
2. Select Start > Run… from the Windows Start menu (use the search box on Vista).
3. Enter thunderbird.exe -ProfileManager and press OK.

On Mac OS X, navigate to /Applications/Utilities, open the Terminal application, type /Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird -ProfileManager, and press Return.

On Linux, start Thunderbird with the -profilemanager switch, e.g. ./thunderbird -ProfileManager (this assumes that you’re in the Thunderbird directory).

You should now see the Profile Manager window, shown in the screenshot to the right.

From the Profile Manager you are also able to remove and rename profiles.

Click on the Create Profile… button to start the Create Profile Wizard. Click Next and enter the name of the profile, e.g. your name or something descriptive.

You can also choose where on the disk you want the profile to be stored, which is useful if you plan on exporting your settings to another computer or setup in the future.

Finally, click Finish to have Thunderbird create the new profile.

You should now be taken back to the Profile Manager and the newly created profile should be listed. Select it and click Start Thunderbird. That’s it!

You are now running Thunderbird with the new profile, which means all settings are reset to default. If you want to switch back to your old profile, just start the Profile Manager again (instructions above) and select the old profile.

You can also have Thunderbird start a selected profile automatically, so you don’t have to pick one each time the browser is launched. Do this by checking the Don’t ask at startup option.

Backing up your profile

Backing up your profile folder in Thunderbird is easy. Just follow these steps (which assumes you know how to manage files on your computer):

1. Shut down Thunderbird completely (File > Exit).
2. Make a copy of your profile folder to, for example, a CD-RW disc or a separate hard disk for backup purposes.

Move an existing profile or restore a backed up profile

It’s possible to move the location of a profile folder. This could be useful if you have a backed up profile folder somewhere on your hard drive and want to tell Thunderbird to use that as your profile. This section explains how to do this.

1. Shut down Thunderbird completely (File > Exit).
2. Move the profile folder to the desired location. For example, on Windows XP, move the profile from C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default to D:\Stuff\MyMailProfile. If you are reading these instructions because you want to restore a previously backed up profile, this step isn’t necessary. Just note the current location of the profile you want to restore.
3. Open up profiles.ini in a text editor. The file is located in the application data folder for Thunderbird:
   • On Windows Vista/XP/2000, the path is %AppData%\Thunderbird\
   • On Windows 95/98/Me, the path is usually C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Thunderbird\
   • On Linux, the path is ~/.thunderbird/
   • On Mac OS X, the path is ~/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird/
4. In profiles.ini, locate the entry for the profile you’ve just moved. Change the Path= line to the new location. IMPORTANT NOTICE: If you switch from a relative path to a non-relative one, the direction of the slashes may need to change (e.g. in Windows, non-relative paths use backslashes, whereas relative ones use forward slashes).
5. Change IsRelative=1 to IsRelative=0.
6. Save profiles.ini and restart Thunderbird.