Thunderbird Community Forum

My current Thunderbird profile has been created dirctly in ...AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird. <Profiles> does exist but not contain any recent files or data. How do I restore a proper data structure without losing any emails, settings or other data?

The screenshot shows the present structure

My Windows 11 was recently reinstalled to factory settings, which uninstalled Thunderbird but saved my mobx files. I used Thunderbird exclusively to view older emails that are stored on my PC as mobx files. I do not use Thunderbird as an active email client. I reinstalled Thunderbird, but have been unable to get it to find my mobx files that are stored together in a folder.

I'm asking this question so I can post some helpful information for people wanting to create a backup of their profile.

If you are using Windows OS and you got your download from the official website: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/all/

How do you locate the correct folder to backup? The backup must contain everything, profiles, mail accounts, emails, address books, calendar, preferences - the lot. The backup can be used to transfer between computers.

I have followed your instructions at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/moving-thunderbird-data-to-a-new-computer and gotten nowhere all day. on it. You have "Profile Folders", a folder called "Profiles", a bunch of profiles (folders) inside the Profiles folder and profiles in Roaming and in Local paths. When I get the old profile 'k41******' copied to the new computer in both the Roaming folder and the Local folder the Thunderbird program still will not show me the old files. I don't need any of the thousands of emails in the old computer, just the Templates in one account. This should be easy. I should just copy the profile k41***** ect. and paste it into the "Profiles" (notice the pleural there) and then Thunderbird should work. But it does not.

My old laptop died, and just reinstalled TB on new laptop. I have the SSD with old profile, and added profile to the new Profiles folder. Thought it would be as simple as editing the Profile.ini to specify the old profile, but that hasn't worked. Need help.

Dennis

Win 11, v.153.0 Firefox (default), v.153.0 T'bird.

Lately, when there's a link in an email and I click on the link, it takes me to a Firefox browser that's not my normal one - this new one doesn't have my settings, saved passwords, or home screen default, etc.

What happened and how can I fix it? Or must I wait for another update? (It just now updated to 153.0 and the problem still exists)

It is quite annoying.

Thanks.

I rebooted my Windows 11 PC yesterday and apparently Thunderbird updated to version Thunderbird 128.6.1esr (64-bit) during the reboot. Unfortunately, when I opened Thunderbird, it showed a Create New Account screen instead of my existing email accounts. I went to "about:profile" and it lists my existing profile as the default, but it will not access any of the accounts in it. I've tried reinstalling Thunderbird over the existing copy and get the same result. I'm at a loss as to how I can retrieve many, many years of emails in six accounts!

7-1-26: Problem when I updated/downloaded Thunderbird 152.0.1. When I try to open, a dialog box asks if I want to create a new profile. By mistake I clicked the "new profile button" but didn't create a new profile since I want to use my previous profile just as with past upgrades. However, I couldn't move past that screen so I closed Thunderbird. Then when I try to re-open Thunderbird, I get that same dialog box and can't move forward. What can I do? Your assistance is truly appreciated, Rick

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

Hi, I am hoping that the community can help me find an answer to this. I have two computers that I use for work. The one in the office has TB running all the time and before I leave for the weekend/vacation I would close TB, copy the profile folder to a USB (or copy it to cloud) and then paste the profile folder on my work laptop (at home). While all the settings get copied (local folders structure, addons etc.) as I use IMAP, it downloads all the mail on the new system regardless. I thought that it should have the latest mail downloaded as part of the profile folder, is that not the case? The bigger issue is that none of the Completed Tasks Lists, Templates, etc. get updated. It still shows all the older stuff on the work laptop and no updates carry over from the PC (at work). Going through the profile folder I see multiple copies of the files prefs.js, folderCache.json, global-messages-db.sqlite appended as: prefs-computername.js and folderCache-computername.json etc. (The computername is the name of the PC - office/laptop) The profile name is the same between the two computers. TB is only started after the profile is copied locally. TB version is the same between systems. I am left scratching my head why somethings are copied but not others. Hoping that the community can help me here. Thanks!

I had to log in this morning, the first time as its automatic, and when i did all my folders and emails have gone. Where are they as there is important information in there which i need. The page layout is different too as i can't delete anything. HELP

I've used thunderbird for years. Now I can't get it back. I tried a clean uninstall/reinstall. Downloaded from the thunderbird site. Seems to install fine, but then says no profile recognized. I put some old profiles in the appdata\roaming\thunderbird\profiles in desperation, but still no luck. My clean uninstall did involve registry entries (Revo-Uninstall). So I'd like to get a clean start with Thunderbird, but it won't let me. Any suggestions greatly appreciated. I dread the idea of using another email after all these years!

I just installed a new router and all of a sudden nothing is working properly on my PC. Among other things, I need to fix Thunderbird, and for that I need to find where my thunderbird profile is. The instructions I've seen say to go to troubleshooting information, find profile folder, and click on "open folder." When I do that, nothing happens. (I told you installing the router appears to have broken everything--I don't know how that happened, especially since I was on the phone with tech support for the router for install), and I'm no closer to finding the profile file. I can enter %appdata%\roaming\thunderbird\profiles but that shows me two different profile directories and I don't know which one is the right one. How can I find the correct file and why doesn't troubleshooting information just show me that?

I have moved my Thunderbird data from drive C:\xxx\Thunderbird to N:\xxx\Thunderbird. The Thunderbird program remains on "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird" How do I tell Thunderbird to find its data on the N: drive?

     Thank you,    Art Lieberman

Somewhere between TB 15 and TB 115 (my current), we lost the TB information page which included a link to the profile. Is there some current replacement for that capability? (I'm having a profile problem and would like to see how that looks to TB.)

Thunderbird 128.14.0esr (64-bit) on an M3 Macbook Pro running Sequoia 15.7.4

I have my own domain and email hosting. I recently changed email hosts and am seeing large files in my profile tied to the old email host. I'd like to recover 30+GB if possible but don't want to do anything hasty.

My Library folder looks like

Thunderbird - Profiles -- myprofilename.default-esr --- oldemailhost.com --- oldemailhost-1.com --- oldemailhost-2.com ... --- oldemailhost-4.com --- newemailhost.com --- newmailhost-1.com ... --- newemailhost-4.com ... etc.

The oldemailhost*.com files take up ~30GB. Can I recover that space without hurting anything?

Thanks.