Today I finally solved the problem of having multiple e-mail clients and multiple storage folders. First I used an IMAP account I have access to in order to move all the old e-mail I have on multiple computers onto the Thunderbird "Local Folders" in Linux on my server. This is as easy as copying all the messages in one Inbox to the Inbox on the IMAP account, and then on the other computer moving the messages out of the Inbox on the IMAP account to the local Inbox account. It's not the fastest, but it's the most compatible as Thunderbird doesn't support much importing from other e-mail storage folders.
So once I had everything on the "Local Folders" account in Thunderbird on Linux, I changed the Local Message Storage directory on Windows (not on the Server) to the storage directory in my home folder on my Linux server via a drive-mapped Samba share:
Y:\.thunderbird\ayrxordj.default\Mail\Local Folders
This can be found by going to Tools->Account Settings->Local Folders. Click Browse. You'll have to have "Show Hidden Files" ON to locate your Local Folders path with the GUI. You also need to make sure that all your e-mail accounts you have are set up to store the mail in the "Local Folders" rather than an individual folder for that account.
After some testing with no networking on the Windows computer, if the client doesn't have accesss to the network drive, you just get nothing under "Local Folders". In other words, it doesn't crash or anything.
So what does this mean? If I download a message on my Windows Thunderbird client, it is exactly like downloading it on the Linux Thunderbird client. It is the same for the Linux client (vice-versa). It also means that now I can have "Delete message from POP after download" set to "Yes" on both clients and avoid downloading e-mail that I've already seen.
Issues I can imagine running into include having both clients open simultaneously and possible Operating System dissimilarities in the implementation of Thunderbird. Also, it took a long time to open the gigantic storage folder the first time over the network, but cleaning up the 2-3 thousand messages and perhaps "compacting" the folders should help. The other issue is, since I merged the two clients, there are several duplicate e-mails, but there is an extension to find & delete duplicate messages which has already solved this problem for me. I removed all the duplicates (leaving me with only roughly two thirds of the messages, because this merge was so large) and compacting the folders did solve the long-to-load problem.
Now I can load up Thunderbird on Windows or Linux using the same "Local Folders" storage directory. Finally, no more getting on different computers/clients to find different mail.
There are still issues with using this technique. If you have a laptop or are losing connectivity, Windows will let you know that "Delayed Writing" failed. Also, a solution like having IMAP storage would be much more network-friendly in terms of bandwidth. See my post on setting up Cyrus IMAPD
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