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102.5.1 failure - mail and calendars are gone

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  • Last reply by rggntljr

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Using T'bird 102.5.1 on Win 10 64bit updated thru the November updates. All was well this morning [emails, calendars, address books, etc]. PC was left on today with network disconnected. When I reconnected the network and restarted T'bird this evening, it's acting like it either lost my profile info or something is corrupted. When I do run, thunderbird -p, my one and only profile name appears but when T'bird starts it wants me to set up email accounts. Calendars appear to be gone. Address Book entries seem to appear OK. Any help on how to recover this would be greatly appreciated.

Using T'bird 102.5.1 on Win 10 64bit updated thru the November updates. All was well this morning [emails, calendars, address books, etc]. PC was left on today with network disconnected. When I reconnected the network and restarted T'bird this evening, it's acting like it either lost my profile info or something is corrupted. When I do run, thunderbird -p, my one and only profile name appears but when T'bird starts it wants me to set up email accounts. Calendars appear to be gone. Address Book entries seem to appear OK. Any help on how to recover this would be greatly appreciated.

Modified by Wayne Mery

Chosen solution

Great minds think alike. After verifying that profiles.ini pointed to the correct location, I renamed prefs.js to prefs_old.js and copied over the prefs.js from the September backup. All seems to be working now and I have all my historical info. I greatly appreciate all the help!

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If you are using all imap accounts, you have your address books, and if there are no local mail folders or calendars, then perhaps the most straight forward process is to add your mail and calendar accounts back.

Otherwise you may need to restore from a backup.

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I use mostly pop accounts [except for one imap account] and sort my mail from each email account inbox into my Local Folders structure. When I look at the Mail folder in my profile, 3 of the email addresses has a -1 version [ie. name.provider-1.com]. The Imap mail folder looks fine. And when I look at Mail\Local Folders, my 22.sbd & 23.sbd folders are there. Sure would be nice to be able to recover this data somehow.

Unfortunately, I have been lax on my backups and the last copy of my complete profile is from September. If I can't somehow "fix" the current profile, I'll use this backup but I won't be happy.

I'm suspecting this problem occurred when T'bird was starting and I mistakenly clicked the T'bird icon again; which tried to start a second instance of T'bird. When the error came up about 2 instances of T'bird can not run, I shut them both down so neither startup completed.

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Hello rggntljr

if you open the pref.js file in the profile directory, is there a line with the word 'use_without_mail_account' in it ?and are there in this file other lines with the word 'account' in them, along your email addresses, the servers that your mails are supposed to go to, etc)

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Thanks gp. Looking at the prefs.js in the crashed Thunderbird folder [v102.5.1], NO there is no line with 'use_without_mail_account' in it. There are also no user_pref lines with "mail.account...", "mail.identity...." or "mail.server..." settings. In the September backup folder [v91.11.0] the prefs.js also does NOT contain the 'use_without_mail_account' in it. It DOES however list many user_prefs lines with "mail.account...", "mail.identity...." or "mail.server" settings.

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If I were you I'd backup the existing prefs.js file and try to replace it with the prefs.js from September. Absolutely no warranty whatever.

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Chosen Solution

Great minds think alike. After verifying that profiles.ini pointed to the correct location, I renamed prefs.js to prefs_old.js and copied over the prefs.js from the September backup. All seems to be working now and I have all my historical info. I greatly appreciate all the help!