Copy the mail folders (mbox files) from the old profile to the new one:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1273917

Thanks for that. I am trying to recover a crash. I went back to April 1 in my backblaze automatic backup but I don't seem to have any mbox files. Where should they be?

I have looked in C:\.......\profiles\ k8mdo19r.default\ Mail\pop.sfr.fr [one of my mail servers] and I get -

Drafts

339.04 KB

Apr 06, 2020, 10:47 AM

Drafts.msf

4.16 KB

Apr 06, 2020, 10:53 AM

Inbox

53.63 MB

Apr 06, 2020, 11:01 AM

Inbox.msf

123.74 KB

Apr 05, 2020, 01:44 PM

Sent

77.76 MB

Apr 06, 2020, 10:47 AM

Sent.msf

405.29 KB

Apr 06, 2020, 10:47 AM

Trash

309.23 MB

Apr 05, 2020, 03:40 PM

Trash.msf

3.09 MB

Apr 06, 2020, 11:06 AM

popstate.dat

64 bytes

Apr 06, 2020, 10:33 AM

Should I have some mbox files in there?

Again, TIA, Barry

The mbox files are there, such as Inbox 53.63MB or Sent 77.76MB. Copy them (ignore the .msf files), renamed if necessary, into ...Mail/Local Folders of the active profile, while TB is closed. When you restart TB, folders named after the mbox should appear under Local Folders in the Folder Pane.

Aha, they are not called Mbox, that helps.

There are other files in there too, actually more important, can I just do the same for them, ignoring .msf? but just copying them across?

Thank you for the help. I have been quite frustrated in my pursuit of a solution, could you recommend a 'good' source of information? I am quite literate in IT, maybe a little rusty, but I find many of the help files make logical jumps and miss out details.

Barry

But, I have two email addresses the sfr one I showed and another one. When I try copying the inbox from the second one it asks if I want to delete the file of the same name, I don't.

Sorry to be a nuisance.

Barry

If you're moving mbox files into Mail/Local Folders, you can rename them before moving, to avoid overwriting existing files. Or copy an mbox and paste it into the same directory, which will create a 'Copy of' file, which can then be renamed. This can be done with any mbox, such as Drafts or Trash in your previous example.

Here is one document on importing folders:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_folders

As the French say "voila"

I have both the inboxes, thank you so much.

Just a couple of questions ;(

There is no sign of the 'sent' mails in the new setup, only trash and outbox are showing, how do I get them to appear?

In the precrash version I had a sort of 'common' inbox for both addresses, how can I set that up in the new version?

Again, thank you so much I am almost normal again ;)

Barry

With POP accounts, the Sent folder is automatically created after the first message is sent.

A Global Inbox can be set up for POP accounts, or select View/Folders/Unified.

Thank you, once again.

One other question. My mailboxes that I recovered, seem to only contain relatively recent mails, i.e. for the last few weeks.

I had a collection of 'older' mails, originally in my inboxes, is there any way I can look back at my email history?

Barry

If the old mail is still on the mail server, which you can check via webmail, the record of which messages have been downloaded to a POP account is stored in popstate.dat, so renaming the dat file will force a download of all the messages on the server.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Popstate.dat

Me again,

If I understand the matter, popstate only contains mails within the time limit I set to retain them. OK, that is my problem.

My query is that, before the crash, my inboxes contained messages which were still 'live' in that I needed to react to them but hadn't done so.

If I have a backup from before the crash, should I be able to recover an inbox with those messages in them?

I have recovered, from the backup, a profiles file from before the crash and moved the inboxes to the new TB installation, but, they only seem to contain current mails, more or less from the date I recovered them and loaded them in current folders.

Once again, sorry for the bother.

Are the older ones somewhere else?

In your backup files, copy the Inbox mbox file - the file with no extension in a subfolder of Mail in the profile backup - into the Mail/Local Folders location of the active profile, while TB is closed. When TB is restarted, the folder should appear under Local Folders in the Folder Pane. If you don't leave mail on the server after download, resetting popstate.dat won't help, so the only place to look is in mbox files in the backup.

OK, I'll have a search in the backups.

Thanks for your patience with me ;)

Barry

Hi, guys. shfhowes is answering things well, so I've nothing to add to the solution. But perhaps this friendly little suggestion will help both barrym and future readers; as barrym says, there are too often things left out of help documents and replies, as well as unconscious assumptions. So I'm not coming down on anyone; just offering a helpful idea.

I would always use the complete word "mailbox" when talking about mailbox files, unless there is a reason to refer to certain ones by, say, extension. ".mbox" is an extension used by some programs, but not by Thunderbird[1]. As barrym managed to intuit somewhere along the line Thunderbird mailbox files don't have any extension (the part of a filename that follows a period or the last period) at all. So he was looking for mailbox files, but was *not* looking for ".mbox files".

"mbox" was understandable (perhaps even common) shorthand, but caused some also-understandable confusion.

Also, barrym, and any future readers,

I use a portable installation of Thunderbird. It *is* the same Thunderbird, just repackaged for some great benefits. You can find it at https://portableapps.com . [Great website, lots of repackaged free, open-source, software there. The advantages of portable software like this include being able to copy/move/delete a program just by copying/moving/deleting the single directory that contains ALL its needed files, and being able to run the program without any changes even if you move or copy it to a new drive or drive letter (so you can carry it or back it up on a flash drive or SD card, for instance). All the installation does is unpack all of the files into one directory (directory structure, if you care for that level of detail here). Oh, also, updates for a program are run in exactly the same way as with the non-portable programs; no change there.]

I mention it here, because it makes it very easy for me to back up my e-mail -- program, letters, settings, configuration, version, and all! In fact, I download any pending e-mail and make a full copy of the entire PortableThunderbird directory every time I'm *about* to do a version update, just in case something should break with the new version (either in the main program or with one of my extensions), and I do the same with my PortableFirefox directory. THEN I do the update, and when I restart Thunderbird, I *do not* let it download mail until I check a few things out; since I manually re-enter my passwords on every restart, this is easy and safe. But even if I did let it download some mail, and didn't like something, then as long as nothing relevantly catastrophic broke, I could perhaps copy & paste, re-mail, request a re-sending from the original author(s), or in some other way just migrate the new mail back to the old installation. Even if that meant opening a mailbox file in Notepad and finding the relevant letter; they are just text files.

And sometimes I copy these directories at other points, just to have a more recent backup.

To go back to the backup, I just delete everything in my "main" PortableThunderbird or PortableFirefox directory and copy and paste everything from my backup directory to "main" one. Presto! All done. (I could delete the main and rename the backup, but I want to keep the backup as, well, a backup :) .) I manually created desktop and Start menu shortcuts to the "main" directory's executable, and they continue to work this way; but you can always run any installation from its own directory.

Have a blessed day!

Thank you pootmonkey for both responses.

Like you, I don't wish to criticise, TB is a free software and therefore support is voluntary.

However, your suggestions are very valid both as regards the way TB is structured and the 'logical jumps' problems inherent in replies from experienced users. I used to manage software development, a long time ago, but I had a policy of never allowing a developer to write the manuals!!

I'll be following up the ideas regarding the portable version, when I get my mails back ;)

Barry