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Thunderbird does not recognize my profile folder and asks for new account settings.

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  • Last reply by metron6

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hello, i use Thunderbird 91.11.0 for Macos 11.6.8

recently i had a hard disk failure, the disk contained my email profile, ~50gigs of mail in several accounts. i managed to restore data, but every time i start Thunderbird, asks me to create a new account.

my profiles.ini is this:

[Profile0] Name=George Michalopoulos IsRelative=0 Path=/Volumes/WD Red 4Tb/#_My_Email/George

[General] StartWithLastProfile=1 Version=2

[Install712DAF5A23ABECDC] Default=/Volumes/WD Red 4Tb/#_My_Email/George Locked=0

and of course, everything i had is in this folder: /Volumes/WD Red 4Tb/#_My_Email/George

i tried to create a new profile, and move all that data there, no good.. please help.

hello, i use Thunderbird 91.11.0 for Macos 11.6.8 recently i had a hard disk failure, the disk contained my email profile, ~50gigs of mail in several accounts. i managed to restore data, but every time i start Thunderbird, asks me to create a new account. my profiles.ini is this: [Profile0] Name=George Michalopoulos IsRelative=0 Path=/Volumes/WD Red 4Tb/#_My_Email/George [General] StartWithLastProfile=1 Version=2 [Install712DAF5A23ABECDC] Default=/Volumes/WD Red 4Tb/#_My_Email/George Locked=0 and of course, everything i had is in this folder: /Volumes/WD Red 4Tb/#_My_Email/George i tried to create a new profile, and move all that data there, no good.. please help.

All Replies (6)

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If you have a complete profile, you can reactivate it with the Profile Manager. I do not know how to execute that on a Mac. On windows, it's done by starting thunderbird.exe with the -p parameter. If you can do that, click 'create profile' on the panel that appears, then click Next, then type in a name for the profile (e.g., MYPROFILE) and after doing that, click the browse button to locate and activate your profile.

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you can start the profile manager in macos, issuing this command to a terminal: /Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin -P

but, even if i create a new one, pointing to my folder, it still wants me to create a new account..

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That indicates there may be a problem with the profile. Check the Mail and Imapmail folders to see if your account is there and your message folders. If the message folders are there, you could copy them to your Mail\Local Folders and then start TB and be able to access them there.

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My mail accounts were there, in ImapMail folder, but when i moved them (folder+msf file) into the new ImapMail folder, nothing happened. Unfortunately i have to re-enter all accounts..

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Those settings are in the prefs.js file. Thunderbird does not automatically recognize accounts.

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thank you very much, David. i have to recreate all accounts, since my backuped prefs.js is ..corrupted.