In addition to figuring out how to encrypt email storage on my USB thumb drive, I'd also like to distribute my storage across both the thumb drive and my most frequently used laptop. In short, I'd like to have my Inbox, Drafts, and Sent Mail on the thumb, then a bunch of archive folders on the laptop. Seems like a simple idea, and I think with Linux it would be simple through symbolic links. But alas, my work confines me to windows most of the time. Is there any way to do this? Perhaps setting up multiple directories in ThunderbirdPortableSettings.ini?
Thanks!
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First off, for encrypting the mail, realistically, you'll need to use something like TrueCrypt, that gives you a virtual drive. The mailstore for Thunderbird consists of dozens of files (or hundreds if you go overboard), so it would be... non-trivial to use file-based encryption unless you did something like zipping up your entire profile into an encrypted archive, unzipping it each time you used it, and rezipping it afterwards, but that means that your mail sits there in plain-text and an undelete app could easily recover it.
For the separating off mail into two stores, personally, I would strongly suggest that you use an IMAP mail service instead, keep all your mail in that, and just mark the main folders for offline use in Thunderbird - that way, they will be downloaded and available even if you don't have an internet connection, but you will be able to get at all your email if you need to.
The other advantage to IMAP is that you can run additional copies of Thunderbird elsewhere, such as on the laptop you mention, without having to use the USB version, and since all your mail is actually stored on the server, then next time you use the other copy, it catches up without you losing any mail.
If you must use POP mail, and store it on the flashdrive, then the only way that I can think of to have the extra folders on a laptop would be to add a second email account to your profile, with its own separate local store, and hand-edit the prefs.js to point to it. I'm not sure that this would work at the best of times, and I suspect that the drive-letter remapping code in the launcher would helpfully "fix" it for you even if it would.
Quite a few ISPs offer IMAP services now for email, though, including gmail, or you could use someone like http://www.fastmail.fm/ which offer services from free upwards. It really is a flexible solution.