Thunderbird Email Accounts do not all show up in profile copied from another location
I recently made a new user account in Windows, so I copied my old Thunderbird profile folder and put it in my new Thunderbird Profile folder (new user account means new AppData, and therefore a new Thunderbird folder), then I ran thunderbird. I also did all the steps necessary to change the path of Thunderbird to direct to that new profile folder.
But when I run Thunderbird, only one of my 6 email accounts shows up. I even installed the Import/Export plugin, Imported my old profile once again, and nothing happened.
When I navigate to the Mail folder of the profile, all of my 6 emails are there, Inbox's full and all. But they won't show up in Thunderbird. Really baffled.
Thanks for any help.
Wayne Mery trɔe
All Replies (3)
Make sure that you are doing this in the correct way. Follow the instructions here: Create a new profile and copy the old one over it
Bruce A. Johnson said
Make sure that you are doing this in the correct way. Follow the instructions here: Create a new profile and copy the old one over it
I followed all the steps over again, but still when I run Thunderbird only one of my accounts shows up.
I hope you have a backup of the original Profile folder. If not, then you may be SOL, because something went wrong when you moved it.
If you do have a backup of the original Profile folder, then I recommend creating a new Profile somewhere other than the AppData folder (not in one of the "special" Windows folders like "Documents" either), and then replacing the contents of the new Profile with the backup of your Profile folder.
If you do not have a backup of the original Profile folder, then:
Backup the Profile folder now.
If you had your e-mail accounts set up as IMAP accounts, then your e-mails are still on the server, so you do not need to do anything special to recover them. Just create the accounts in Thunderbird again.
If you had any of your e-mail accounts set up as POP accounts, then create the accounts in Thunderbird, let them download what is on the server, then do some recovery of the e-mails that you are missing.
In the profile folder is a folder called Mail. In that folder is a folder called Local Folders and folders for each POP account. If you re-created the POP accounts, then there will be two folders for each POP server, one without a number, which is the original folder, and one with a number, which is the one you just recreated. Note the location of the old/original folder.
Follow the instructions Installing an Add-on in Thunderbird to install the add-on ImportExportTools.
In the Thunderbird Local Folders, create a folder that you will import the e-mails from one of the old POP folders. Then right-click that folder and choose ImportExportTools: Import mbox file.
In the "Files mbox import" window, select "Import one or more mbox files, with its/their subdirectory".
Then navigate to the old/original POP folder you found and select the files that do not have file extensions. These are the mbox files containing e-mails. Click the "Open" button to import these folders.
On my computer, this import in not working 100%. It is not importing the subfolders of Thunderbird folders like it is supposed to. If that happens to you also, then you will have to repeat the import procedure for each *.sbd folder in the POP folder.
Then do this all again for other e-mail accounts you had set up as POP.