Cant use windows 8.1 Windows Easy Transfer on Windows 8.1

In a business/enterprise environment (i.e. - the "my company" you mentioned) you can (and likely should) use the User State Migration Tool (USMT).

BS.  We are very old and do not trust any thing that is "saved to something" located in the sky.  I am trying to transfer a simple Thunderbird email profile file that contains my wife's thunderbird email  "local" folders from our old win xp pro computer to our new win 8.1 computer.  The only reason that we have had to move the files is because we have had to upgrade the XP computer we that are familiar with to a new Dell win 8.1 computer.  Now this may not be very important to some but it is very important to us (more so to my wife to whom I have a had time trying to explain why I can't do this).  What is so sad is that we have been win users since our first win 8088 computer that I built.  Before that we started with a commodore.  Sorry but we are now not supporters of MS.  If we could afford it we would move to Apple.  What really P----- me off is that we can not afford to move.

Mozilla Thunderbird?  You'd have had to do a custom W.E.T. anyway ...

Use:

http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/download.php

This is a ridiculous response to a valid question.  Anyone with any technical knowledge knows that transferring through SkyDrive is NOT a substitute for Windows Easy Transfer.  This is like deprecating Excel from Office and saying that 'you can make something that looks like a spreadsheet in Word'.  This is just another example of some bureaucrat in Redmond deciding that the rest of us don't need what was a truly valuable and useful tool.  This type of inane response to a valid question just reinforces the impression that MS arbitrarily deprecates functionality for no apparent reason and with no consideration for the users.

The response itself merely passes the facts forward, so that in itself is not ridiculous and while it may not provide a way to make the deprecated feature function - it presented the facts.  Unfortunately, "support engineers" may not have the influence you think or desire that they do.  :-)