Hi Not a Mac user, so I can't help with local path on Mac. However, in general - Thunderbird Local Folders tree is designed to be local - that is, on the computer's own drive. Some people have tried putting it on a network, not successfully. The rest of Thunderbird - all emails stored in folders except Local Folders - is designed to sync with your online account if that is set up as IMAP, and can then be accessed from any computer. So if you have IMAP working on Windows and Mac, one option is to copy the folders you want to access from both machines to a folder that is not in Local Folders. Test first with a less important folder and be sure to copy, not move, to see if the result is what you want. Here is a similar question about storing on Google Drive https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1092390 that explains a more about how Local Folders works as a separate store from the rest of email, and yet is integrated through Thunderbird for ease of access and searching.

Thank you Agnes, I succeeded in having local folders on what the OS recognized as a local drive, although it is synced with Google drive. This has actually worked for me several years both on MacOS and Windows and is (for now?) still working on Windows; It just stopped working on MacOS yesterday, and i have no clue why the mail folders are even not recognized any more by TB (searching for them when choosing the path for "local folders" under the settings function), while there are still there according to the Finder.

I don't know why Local Folders on a network drive would stop working on MacOS, but maybe it would work if they were added as an additional 'Local Folders' with this add-on:

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/localfolder/

It could be caused by Google OAuth2 authentication requirements for mail, calendar and contacts accounts.

Access might also be caused by incorrect proxy settings in the MacOS TB; it should be 'No proxy' in Preferences/Network & Disk Space, Connection.

Thank you sfhowes, unfortunately non of your suggestions worked; is there anybody else who has this problem? margaretha

Thunderbird is not tested with any form of cloud synced storage location and they are implicated in many many issues relating to data corruption and duplication. Some folk have reported having 100 prefs.js (preferences) files for instance, others see issues with data simply not being saved at all, duplicated or just plain old fasioned corruption.

I would strongly suggest you store your mail in an IMAP mail account in the cloud and synchronize the mail between instances using IMAP. There is NO supported cloud storage solution other than an IMAP mail account. Even the use of local network storage locations is problematic with bugs appearing on a regular basis.

While is it "working" for you on windows, it is a poor long term choice if you value your data.

thank you Matt; IMAP has one problem: storage limits...

thank you Matt; IMAP has one problem: storage limits...

Google offers me 100gb for $2.49 ($1.99US) a month and 2Tb of storage for $12.49 a month. Google workspaces increase that to 5Tb.

So I really do not think space is a limit, price might be. But you are already using Google storage, so really I see no difference at all as gmail and drive share a single storage allocation.

I am sure there are similar offers from other providers out there as well, that one was just easy for me to look at because I am a customer.

it is my work account, within my organization i cannot ask for more storage :-(

Consider storing your Local Folders on a removable drive and inserting it in whatever computer you're using. Mail folders are easily exported from and imported to TB, and you could probably use the LocalFolders add-on to make the connection easier. Performance would be much better than cloud options, and the low cost of portable storage is a big advantage.

thanks, I think this will solve my problem. bthw: i discovered that the on board mail programme in MacOS does read the folders, so this is a second option, I regret to abandon thunderbird, but....

Installing portable TB on an external drive is feasible if only Windows computers are involved, but by storing just the mail folders on the drive, they can be read from TB that is on any OS X, Windows or Linux computer.