Thunderbird Community Forum

I am still running Windows 10, but as of yesterday every time I open Thunderbird it resets my settings and spends hours re-downloading every email that I have. It constantly tells me that the connection to the server has failed and that all my passwords are wrong. Nothing is wrong with the server and none of my passwords are incorrect. After about 2 hrs, it completely re-downloads every email (I have multiple accounts) and I can continue to work like nothing was ever wrong in the first place. However, if I close out the program, it starts all over again. It randomly picks an email account and requires that I start from scratch and reset them up. Other times they are there like nothing happened. I have restarted my computer multiple times, it continues to do this.

Essentially, I want to back up my Thunderbird. The standard way seems to be via Export / Import, but there is an implied limit of 2GB. The export function has successfully ended and produced a file of 15GB. Can I rely on this? (In the sense of being able to Import it should I need to?

Thanks in advance for any help / advice you can give.

I was not able to boot up my Thunderbird email client and had to reload it. But after I got it going, I realized there are many missing folders, and there is a lot of missing messages in my "sent" folder. Why?

最近、リリース版Thunderbird 157.0.1にアップデートしたら、今までの①アドレス帳、及び②送信メールデータが全部消えてしまった。その後、リリース版を削除して従来の通常版をバージョンを再インスト―ルしたが、今までの①アドレス帳、及び②送信メールデータは出てこない。ついては、この2つのデータを復元する方法を教えてください。 よろしくお願いします。

Quick breakdown: I had my old boss's email loaded in Thunderbird for a short while Didn't want to be invasive after project ended Removed profile from Thunderbird Then Shaw and Rogers Merged - Sold email service too 3rd party Easy-On-Net Easy On Net dropped the ball and all of the historic folders and contents were lost when Shaw/Rogers severed their connection Can I recover up until the point I disconnected his old profile?

I am a bit of a noob, and probably out of my depth, so please bear with me. It also is a bit of a confusing situation so I hope that I can explain it clearly.

A while ago, Thunderbird stopped working. Whenever I tried starting it up, I got an error message saying that Thunderbird wasn't responding. I thought there might be a problem with some update so I decided that I would reinstall the program. As I went to back up my profile, I found out that there were actually two profile folders where in the past I would only find one. I chose to back up both, and procede with de- and re-installing Thunderbird. After doing so I tried to integrate the old profiles back into the new installation. At first, I chose the largest of the to profile maps and copied it where I found it before the re-installation. I created a new profile using the old profile folder through the User Profile menu. This seemed to work! However, I noticed something. I have two e-mail accounts running in this profile. One IMAP and one POP. I noticed that the POP account was missing about a years worth of old e-mails. As if it stopped saving them at some point. I figured they must be in the other profile folder I found before the re-installation. I tried creating a new profile with this profile but when starting up Thunderbird afterwards I once again got the 'Thunderbird isn't responding' message. So I reverted back to the first profile I made, the one with the missing e-mails. Appart from those e-mails, it seemed to be working well. To get back what was missing, I tried copying the files in the "inbox.sbd" of the back up that wasn't responding into the back up that was responding, thinking that if it messed something up, I could just CTRL + Z my way out of trouble. It seemed that there were three locations in the functioning back up that I could copy the files into, each having the server name of the e-mail account that I was missing e-mails from. I tried copying the files in each of them, each time removing the files through 'undo' before trying the next location. As this seemed unsuccesfull I tried restarting Thunderbird again (having removed the copied files from all locations) which resulted in the following error message:

In a pink screen that I have never seen before. After this I tried removing all profiles and starting again with a fresh copy of the backed up profile folder as I figured I might have accidentally changed something in the profile folder I was using. This however keeps giving the same error message.

Clearly, I messed something up. But I don't know what. Can anybody help? One last thing I noticed that in the 'Mail' folder within the profile folder, there where three folders with the server name before, now there is only one. I guess this is a clue?

All help is welcome!

Hello! After a Windows 10 update (around September 5, 2026), Thunderbird stopped receiving Gmail messages. Laptop: Dell, Windows 10. Account: Gmail. The problem occurs both in Russia and abroad. My emails were organized into a folder structure created inside Thunderbird. The most important thing for me is to restore this internal folder structure with all its messages. What we tried: • We kept the old Thunderbird profile folder as a backup and created a new profile. • In the new profile we switched the account to POP3 so that emails are stored on the computer. • Thunderbird downloaded the emails, but only up to a certain date (around 2023). Newer messages did not download. • The old folder structure did not appear in the new profile. Thunderbird version: [version]. Authentication method: [OAuth2 / normal password]. Error message: [error text]. Could you please advise: 1. How to restore my old folder structure from the saved profile folder? 2. How to make Thunderbird download all emails, including the recent ones, and keep receiving new mail? Thank you!

Hi, hoping someone could help as I am struggling to get my information back. I am using Ubuntu Cinnamon.

Thunderbird crashed last night, wouldn't work, tried safe mode. Nothing fixed it. It hung when opening up and after 30 seconds said force quit. So I was forced to reinstall. I did a manual backup but not using the inbuilt tool as I couldn't get into Thunderbird. I just copied the data from username/.thunderbird

After spending a long time uninstalling. Because it reached 78% and then crashed on uninstall. Eventually after reading various pages on the internet I managed to reinstall from the Ubuntu software manager using the latest snap version. (Which I am not sure was what was actually installed previously).

However having used thunderbird for nearly 20 years or so. I have a username/.thunderbird folder. And when I moved to this platform, I have a snap/thunderbird/common/.thunderbird folder.

I installed this new distro 2 years ago, and remember having issues getting my data into the system under Snap. But eventually got it to work somehow back then.

However since reinstalling I cannot see the last 2 years of emails, archives or data. It has launched into a 2 year old profile. I appear to have lost most of the emails from the archive folders (but kept the folders) removed all of the personal folders but then dumped all those emails into my inbox. Giving me 6500 emails that were in various personal folders. (I don't get 6500 emails in a year so don't know what has happened.) It has even changed all of the new dates to the US format, so nothing makes any sense.

I now have 2 Thunderbird profiles, over 12GB in size. And have apparently lost 2 years of my life. But reading support pages, suggests I should be okay because thunderbird doesn't delete data when you reinstall?

I have looked through various other threads which talk about pointing it at the profiles and mail boxes, however nothing works.

Any help much needed.

I have a proper profile stored in an backup and 1 *.msf wasn´t restored on the new computer, but it is needed as soon as possible. My tries to restore it wasn´t successfull, there are no needed things to restore. The needed msf is located in the new profile, and I can´t see the item. Therefore I need help for restoring this particular *.msf. Greets The Texman aka K.-P. Aldag

I am installing Thunderbird for the first time on a new win 11 box. During the install, a "special" email account was created (not by me). I would rather not have the account, but when I right click on the account, the "delete" option is not there, and the account description (immediately below Account Settings) is "The following is a special account. There are no identities associated with it.". Is it possible to delete this account or at least hide it on the accounts list?

I did an uninstall/reinstall hoping to start over, but that did not do a complete reset, and the new install came up with the same accounts (including the "special") as I had set up before.

So, can I remove the account from the existing install, or can you tell me how to do a "clean" reinstall that forgets all previous account information?

After new installation I want to use my profile of the former installation. In principle I followed the procedure of the article "An einem anderen Ort wiederherstellen". After that when starting thunderbird it always asks me to create a new account.

Does anyone know what is missing?

I've read that I can create several Thunderbird profiles and load my desired Profile to startup and use the Profile Manager to switch profiles. I'm guessing that I can only load one profile into Thunderbird at a time (?).

And if I wanted to check emails from another profile I'd have to close or switch or somehow unload the current profile(?).

It would seem to me if it were possible to load more than one profile at a time, then if two profiles had the exact same mailbox account, it would cause problems(?).

Appreciate any input from those with experience in this.

I use Thunderbird on multiple computers, sharing an NAS. One is Windows 10, one is Linux Mint. Both have Thunderbird 153.3.1esr installed. The email Profile and email file storage is on the NAS. The "home" folders on both machines have a profile.ini file that points to that shared profile. This worked fine for many years.

For perhaps 6 months i've only accessed email from Windows. Now i'm trying again to access from LinuxMint. It no longer works.

From Linux, at startup, Thunderbird complains that i'm trying to open my profile from "an older version of Thunderbird". A popup dialog claims "A newer version of Thunderbird may have made changes to your profile which are no longer compatible with this older version. " It offers to create a new profile.

First, the same version last edited the profile as is reading it. Second, i don't want to create a new profile, as the existing one has multiple email accounts at multiple domains, with multiple sigatures, and custom storage paths, etc. I tried profile manager, but it just takes me back to this dialog.

How do i get Thunderbird to use my existing shared email storage ?

I have followed the instructions to txfer the profile to new PC W.11 - from W.10. T'bird says: "Your Thunderbird profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible."

I have the old folder from 'roaming' pasted in correctly - did it twice. No change.

I also have all my message folder ready on the new PC. These are held in a better location for bak up. When I moved to the last machine - nine years ago - I had exactly the same problem!

As new install will not load the profile I cannot get into it to tell it anything.

Suggestions welcome. SCA

Hello, I urgently need help recovering emails and archive folders that have disappeared from Thunderbird.

Here is what happened: I had an email account configured in Thunderbird using POP3. Over the years, all the emails and the entire email history were downloaded and stored locally in Thunderbird. I also had several archive folders containing important emails and documents.

The mailbox was recently moved from the old mail server to a new mail server using IMAP. The account was then set up again in Thunderbird as a new IMAP account.

The old POP3 account/configuration was left untouched, because I expected the old emails and folders stored locally in Thunderbird to remain available.

However, after setting up the new IMAP account, I can no longer see the previous email history or the archive folders from the old POP3 account. Some of these folders contain very important documents that I need to recover.

I would like to emphasize that I am not asking to recover emails from the old mail server. The emails and archives had previously been downloaded and stored locally in Thunderbird through the POP3 configuration.

Could you please help me determine, how I can locate and restore the old Thunderbird profile or Local Folders? The emails and archive folders are very important, so I would really appreciate detailed instructions on how to safely recover them. I have not intentionally deleted the old emails or archive folders.

Technical information: Email address: biuro@wojciechprzybylski.pl Old mail server: server.go4win.pl Old account type: POP3 Approximate date of the migration: 15.09,2026 Missing folders/emails: Archiwum

Thank you very much for your help.

Best regards, Halina Kaczyńska

Never could Install TBird 152 ... Found Out that Profile Bugs started with Tbird 138... Loaded Tbird 135 To Avoid Profile Bugs... Now I am getting a Strange Error Message ... Now I am getting a strange Nuisance Prompt Says I need to Create New Profile .

Hi I am an older person and have lost my profiles on thunderbird email - one is [redacted]@xtra.co.nz and the other is [redacted]@xtra.co.nz. We are in NZ and accidently deleted the Thunderbird profile and not the corrupted new profile I was setting up. Thank you. Gloria Sandbrook. I still have [redacted]@xtra.co.nz on my phone for communication. Cheers.

I have posted another question about my corrupted TB profile and restoring it. Having done the restore and looked through the profile folder it is clear that this is full of old files that are no longer supported/needed.

Is there a utility that removes these old files?

I'm not sure if TB updates should remove them but it doesn't appear to have done so.

When I read https://kb.mozillazine.org/Files_and_folders_in_the_profile_-_Thunderbird it is clear that there are so many of these that doing it manually would be prone to error. That resource also says it does not know what some of the files actually do.

Is there a better resource that lists just the latest files maintained by Mozilla?

If I do a new export does it only export the files it needs? The last time I ran an export the resulting zip did not contain all the files from the TB installation but I have no idea why.

I have copied Thunderbird folder from C:users\maris\AppData\roaming on old PC. Had it working on the new PC, but it suffered an unrecoverable error during a windows update after only five days. Other reinstalled apps now running OK, but have been unable to replicate the successful installation from a few days ago. Found additional profiles in profiles.ini and deleted them. Made no difference!