This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Lost address book and email folders

  • 2 replies
  • 0 have this problem
  • Last reply by stephen25

more options

When I updated my version of Thunderbird I lost my address book and my previous email folders. How can I restore them? I'm using a Windows 10 computer.

When I updated my version of Thunderbird I lost my address book and my previous email folders. How can I restore them? I'm using a Windows 10 computer.

Chosen solution

Did the update leave you with a request to define an email address? If so, your profile is probably still available and components can probably be recovered. You can check this with a few steps: - click help>troubleshootinginformation - scroll down to 'profile folder' and click 'open folder' - you are now in the profile in windows file explorer, click the back arrow to back up one folder - you are now in the ...appdata\roaming\thunderbird\profile folder, there may be more than one folder there, - look for abook.sqlite in each and last updated date. The one that is larger and older would be your addressbook. - if you have a POP account, look in the Mail folder for the account and message folders, such as inbox, inbox.msf. Those would be your message folders. TO activate the addressbook in thunderbird, click tools>import>importfromafile>importaddressbook>sqlitedatabasefile and then locate and select the discovered abook.sqlite. For the message files, a simple way is to - create local folder for each folder to retrieve - install the addon importeporttools if not already done - highlight new folder, rightclick and select the importexport option to import mbox and select one of the discovered message files (ignore the .msf files). - repeat above step for each messagefile.

Read this answer in context 👍 0

All Replies (2)

more options

Chosen Solution

Did the update leave you with a request to define an email address? If so, your profile is probably still available and components can probably be recovered. You can check this with a few steps: - click help>troubleshootinginformation - scroll down to 'profile folder' and click 'open folder' - you are now in the profile in windows file explorer, click the back arrow to back up one folder - you are now in the ...appdata\roaming\thunderbird\profile folder, there may be more than one folder there, - look for abook.sqlite in each and last updated date. The one that is larger and older would be your addressbook. - if you have a POP account, look in the Mail folder for the account and message folders, such as inbox, inbox.msf. Those would be your message folders. TO activate the addressbook in thunderbird, click tools>import>importfromafile>importaddressbook>sqlitedatabasefile and then locate and select the discovered abook.sqlite. For the message files, a simple way is to - create local folder for each folder to retrieve - install the addon importeporttools if not already done - highlight new folder, rightclick and select the importexport option to import mbox and select one of the discovered message files (ignore the .msf files). - repeat above step for each messagefile.

Helpful?

more options

Thanks David, The import function restored everything in one go.

Helpful?

Ask a question

You must log in to your account to reply to posts. Please start a new question, if you do not have an account yet.