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How to restore tags from a profile backup?

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  • Last reply by sfhowes

Savas
Savas
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I backed up my profile folder as I wanted to do a fresh install of Thunderbird, re-added my accounts, but my tags have not synced.

I was able to copy over the tags from prefs.js to my new install, however all tags are showing 0, basically none of the emails have the tags associated to them. What steps can I take to add the tags back to the emails? (https://superuser.com/questions/983401/import-export-or-retrieve-thunderbird-tags-from-imap-server)

I could restore the profile folder, yes, but that's the last resort.

I backed up my profile folder as I wanted to do a fresh install of Thunderbird, re-added my accounts, but my tags have not synced. I was able to copy over the tags from prefs.js to my new install, however all tags are showing 0, basically none of the emails have the tags associated to them. What steps can I take to add the tags back to the emails? (https://superuser.com/questions/983401/import-export-or-retrieve-thunderbird-tags-from-imap-server) I could restore the profile folder, yes, but that's the last resort.

Modified by Savas

All Replies (3)

sfhowes
sfhowes
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Tags are stored in the .msf files, and the .msf files would have been recreated when adding the accounts. The tags would only reappear if the IMAP server supports keywords:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Tags#IMAP

If a server doesn't support keywords, it's better to use some other type of labelling, such as distinct subfolders.

You can try creating a separate profile based on your backup: Help/Troubleshooting, about:profiles, create a new profile and select the backup as the source (Choose folder...). This won't affect the current profile.

Savas
Savas Question owner
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Thanks, I did play around with it a little and restored just the .msf files (in the ImapMail/emailaccount folder), after restarting they did show up, but that's obviously a manual process. Maybe that's something I can live with, but I'm just wondering on whether outlook/hotmail supports imap keywords. I guess no, although after searching I still could not find anything solid regarding this - odd.

sfhowes
sfhowes
  • Top 10 Contributor
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The easy way to test is to tag a message Important on one computer, then see if the tag is shown on the same message on another computer. Hotmail/outlook.com and AOL don't sync tags, but gmail does. If you have custom tags, the same ones have to be defined on the other computer.