Update mail server settings in Thunderbird for *many* accounts at once

Help

I have my own domain registered, and have lots of email addresses established under my domain. (If I have signed up for a service, I probably have an email address unique to that service so I can tell who is selling my information to spammers and shut that down. If I buy something from acme.com, I probably have an acme@mydomain.net email address defined.)

I have Thunderbird set up to check all my email accounts so I can keep track of all my new emails. There are MANY POP3 inboxes defined in my client.

I have grown frustrated with my web hosting (and thus mail hosting) service, which used to have great service but in the last few years seems to have changed from "How can we take care of our customers" to a business plan of "We hope our customers are too busy to move to a better service." I would like to move to a different web host, and recognize that I'm going to have to re-create all of my email addresses on my new host (unless CPanel somehow allows me to export their definitions in a way that can then be imported in the new environment).

But if possible, I'd really prefer to not also have to go through (literally) a few hundred Thunderbird "Account Server Settings" pages to update the server name in each.

Is there a single file that can be find/replaced somewhere in the .thunderbird directory, or a specific file that can be updated by script in each of the "mymailserver.mywebhost-n.com" (presumably then renaming that directory to match…) directories to make this go faster? Or, is there some other way that this can be scripted (e.g., some change in the sqlite files that so far has eluded me)?

I've grepped the .thunderbird directory: grep -r mymailserver.mywebhost.com but this has given me more clutter than is helpful — including each of the hundreds of folders for the accounts.

I've looked into individual files in the .thunderbird directory, and in some of the "mymailserver.mywebhost-n.com" directories, as text or using od -A x -t x1z -v <filename> for binary files, looking for references to mymailserver without finding anything that looks like a "setting" being stored.

I've performed web searches, but only ever seem to come up with how to change the server settings for a single account using the Thunderbird GUI.

Thanks!

Posted Jan 4, 2023, 6:20 PM UTC

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