one point. if you copied the entire appdata/roaming/thunderbird. then you should not be doing anything to create a new profile. The location of the profile will have come from the windows 10 device.

Hi - I followed the instructions in the following link

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/moving-thunderbird-data-to-a-new-computer

Because the drive is not able to boot or anything, I searched for what I thought was the data file for the profile on the non bootable disk, then copy and pasted it into the new install on the win 7 drive - same location as from the win 10 drive.

When I opened TB it didn't recognise it, so I tried the P command and made sure I pointed to the copied file - no joy.

At that point I tried again with creating new profile and again pointing to another paste of the directory which I placed elsewhere on the drive incase that was the problem

What is strange I did not add any email accounts myself into the TB installation, yet it somehow accessed my Hotmail account - hence DL the messages

As I said not downloaded though were GMAIL, any of my sent messages, local folders or address book

All I can think is where they stored elsewhere on the win10 installation - I always used default settings

If anyone could confirm any folder structures or particular file names I could do a search on the win10 drive and see if they are elsewhere

thanks

Thunderbird stores it's setting file profile.ini in the folder %appdata%\Thunderbird. type that into a window run dialog (win key +R) to determine the exact location on amy windows PC including XP.

The default is to store the profile folder in a sub folder of %appdata%\Thunderbird called funnily enough profiles. OPening the profiles folder you should see the actual profile folder (there may be more than one as you have been adding them working out which to look in will require some guesswork.

Look in the profile folder for the files prefs.js, abook.mab and any other mab files. the dates on the global.messages.bd.sglite file will give you clues.

Can you find any mab files (address books) more than a couple of KB in size?

Open the mail folder and look in the sub folders with server names and Local folders for msf files with your folder names. Are there much larger files with no extension with them that have the same name?

Brilliant sorted - using your guidelines and not trusting the "blanket" copy and paste, I went through and copied the directories and specific files individually, then pasted them on a brand new install

Loaded Thunderbird and all was there -- yesss !

Thank you so much for helping me with this problem