Sorry, nothing seems to happen, things just froze up. I know the file size is very large, but it is hard to believe that I can't open it. The file, as you know, is stored in the Thunderbird folder, surely there has to be an easier way of opening it. Sorry, am just getting a bit fed up.

I know you tried Notepad and Far Manager.

Did you download Elitepad lite as it is supposed to be able to open files up to 2GB.? Although it may take a while to actually open and I would suggest not using other programs whilst this happens.

• http://www.editpadlite.com/download.html

You could try using this free file splitter program to split the file into smaller pieces, do the editing of checking to see if the X-Mozilla-Status header has 0008, changing them to 0001; and then combine together again. Make sure you have a copy of that file...just in case. Splitting the file may make it easier to open if the elitepad lite program cannot do the job.

• http://www.snapfiles.com/screenshots/gsplit.htm

At this point we are trying to establish whether there are marked as deleted emails which could make emails completely disappear if compacted; or whether the file itself is just too big to open.

If you split the files, it may actually be easier to open them in Thunderbird, if the file size is too big and there is a memory issue causing the problem.

So lets approach this from that position. Download the program and split the files into smallermbox files and rename appropriately.

Saving them as separate Inbox 's. you could name each one OldInbox1, OldInbox2 etc and copy paste them into the Profile folders mail account name.

Each email will start with lines like this, so that you know where the start of each email is: From - Thu Dec 20 09:19:28 2012 X-Account-Key: account1 X-UIDL: AENUfbwAAL1yUNHinwQdzVEUII0 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000

Then when you start Thunderbird, see if those mbox files open and show emails. If they do then you can delete the original Inbox and Inbox.msf files and Thunderbird will recreate a new one. Remember Thunderbird must be closed when performing changes to the Profile folder.