Transferring Email between computers and from Outlook to Thunderbird

I thought I would start this tech notes blog to help me keep track of various techy sorts of things. This first post is about transferring email from one laptop to another and from outlook to thunderbird. At first this seemed terribly difficult and I trudged through countless articles on the subject, nearly all of which seemed to indicate that I would eventually have to buy a third party bit of software to be able to read and export Outlook's .pst files.
The final solution was rather simple. Since I couldn't get Thunderbird to read .pst files, and I didn't want to pay for a .pst reader/translator, I thought I would go the route of importing outlook email into another program and figure out howto export it from there. I tried Eudora, but it died a horrible death, supposedly at the 6gb size of the Outlook .pst file I was nursing. After that, I realized my stupidity. Why not just thunderbird on both computers? I had already installed Thunderbird on the first computer in order to have a halfway decent rss reader so it was very easy to import all my mail and contacts. I then took the Mail folder hidden at C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\.default\ and just copied it over the same directory into the second computer's thunderbird directory. I started up thunderbird on the second laptop an it happily loaded all the email I had just plopped in there.

After that, there was a bit of reorganization and remarking everything as read and so on, but all in all, it was fairly painless.