I am transferring from a windows 2000 computer to a Mac OSX (the Mac email application would not install a stand alone pst file from outlook). I followed the instructions here and I now have all my old emails and addresses in thunderbird on the Mac (I could now easily import from thunderbird into the standard Mac OSX Mail programme if I wished). Thanks a lot. I edited the profiles.ini file in textedit on the Mac rather than via the console. FYI, the profiles on the Mac are stored in Users/username/library/thunderbird/profiles. Thanks Nell