Thunderbird Global Message database
For some unknown reason, I recently managed to delete all the email messages from my website's host server and uninstall Thunderbird. The server now contains only about 300 messages, some new from after the meltdown and some restored from a backup. I reinstalled Thunderbird and connected it to a previous profile on my PC which contains a global message .sqlite database file containg over 1900 messages. But Thunderbird now ignores this file and will only show me the messages currently on the server.
Can anyone suggest a way to force Thunderbird to use its own database or to get the contents of the database onto my website?
All Replies (6)
You can't retrieve the messages from the sqlite file, but if you have the old profile, look for the mbox files - the large files with no extension, named after folders, in Mail/<popserver>, Mail/Local Folders, ImapMail/<imapserver>, and sbd subdirectories of those locations - and copy them into Mail/Local Folders of the active profile, with TB closed. They should appear under Local Folders in the Folder Pane when TB restarts.
I found one INBOX in ImapMail but its contents were the same as what are stll on the server (635 messages at the moment). But the SQL file has 2,547 and I can deduce from the docid that there were originally 43,165, most of which have been deleted as Junk. Thunderbird is still keeping the SQL file up to date.
What I do not understand is why the SQLfile is in the profile on my computer, who/what will ever use it and for what purpose?
The sqlite file is for Global Search. To reset it to index the current message store, delete it, and it will be rebuilt when TB restarts.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/rebuilding-global-database
Thank you for your help. I have given up hoping to replace the lost emails on my server, but I have found an alternative solution.
I downloaded a free program from the web (DB Browser sqlite) which allowed me to convert each table in the Global Search file into a spreadsheet and I found that I only needed 2 of the tables - MessagesText_content contains most of the useful information from each email and MessageText_ segments contains the dates. There were some problems in matching up the dates and transferring them from one table to the other - the dates spreadsheet had twice as many entries because it still contained records that had been deleted, and the dates were in 16-digit Unix format.
But I now have one spreadsheet containing all my old emails for future reference.
Glad to hear you managed to extract something from the file. But I'm sure you'd agree it would be much easier to restore from a direct backup of the mail folders. MailStore Home is worth considering for archiving or backups.
Thank you. I have downloaded MailStore Home.