Thunderbird Community Forum

I created a user profile for IMAP and all was OK....Until I deleted the profile for POP and I lost all e-mail folders that I didn't move to IMAP. My PC is running Linux Mint. How do I get my lost e-mails?

Hi everyone,

My antivirus as quarantined 2 files from my TB profile:

• d:\internet profiles\thunderbird\profiles\z3rq1w7t.default\prefs.js
• d:\internet profiles\thunderbird\profiles\z3rq1w7t.default\virtualfolders.dat

I asked the antivirus to restore them, but the damage is done. TB has lost track of everything I’d stored over the years, including my email accounts, emails, preferences, etc. It’s like a fresh install.

But I can see that my profile still contains about 5 bg of data. So everything’s there, but it seems it no longer knows how to access it.

As you can see, my profile isn’t buried in the depths of Windows; it’s on my D drive. Perhaps I just need to ‘reconnect’ TB to the correct profile, but I don’t know how to do that anymore…

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance. Guy

I'm trying to trim down my hard drive, and I see that my Profiles folder has 2 ImapMail subfolders. In the first of them, imap-gmail, I have 14 All Mail files numbered "-1" to "-13" plus the most recent All Mail (today's date), unnumbered. Most of these All Mail files are quite large. Can I delete all of them except the most recent, unnumbered one? In the second subfolder, imap-gmail1, the files are all from before 2025, and instead of multiple "All Mail" files I have multiple "rstmp" files. What's the deal? Can I delete this whole folder? Is it a backup? Thanks for your help. FYI, I'm up to date in Windows 11 and Thunderbird, with a fairly new computer. I hope I've provided enough into. Looking forward to your help. all the best, Steve