Downgrade Thunderbird profile from 78 to 68
Hello guys, I'm a thunderbird fanatic and use it even at work managing 10+ accounts. Up to Thunderbird 68, all was super fine:
The massive profile with 60+ folder was well organized with a handful of incredible add-ons to: - color folders - customize color account background - manage folder sorting The workflow was smooth and very productive: the folder colored to my like, the new email received were visible at a glance in the related folder by simply browsing and detecting the different accent in the folder name, and so on.
I always loved updates and kept the auto update on... until yesterday when my 68 has been migrated automatically to 78 !
No one of the necessary add-ons works anymore! No one of those fantastic the developer is anymore interested in upgrading them (changes are too frequent, and need to invest too much time to upgrade them) The interface is to uniform, I cannot customize colors in the same efficient way.... If I want the same 60+ nested folder sorting, I need to rename all of them... When a folder receives a new email the accent color (sort of bold blue) is nearly same as that of a folder with unread email (bold black)... Oh my god, what a mess !
Since no add-ons are available to re arrange the profile like it was with Thunderbird 68, my only option is to roll-back to 68... and stay there until the necessary add-on will get back to 78 (if any).
Do you know how I can convert back my profile just upgraded to 78 back to 68 ???
Please Please Please, help me ! Pietro
Chosen solution
Open your profile folder and see if you have a file named abook.mab.bak and another named history.mab.bak. Those are backups of your Personal and Collected addressbooks in the old .mab addressbook format (v78 does not use the mab format, but v68 does. This is one of the major changes introduced in v78). To restore those backups, simply rename them to their original name, e.g abook.mab and history.mab and restart Thunderbird.
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Thanks, these are good instructions.
Interestingly, version 68.12.1 is still shown as "up to date", in the About window.
I remember reading this in another forum post here, but can't find the link, that this is an intentional decision made by the Thunderbird developers. This is a good thing. There have been many reports of slowdowns and other problems after upgrading from 68 to 78. The developers are to be commended for stopping automatic updates from 68 to 78. It's a blow to your pride to admit you've laid an egg, so it took courage for the Thunderbird developers to do something like this. Good for them.
As this long and tedious topic illustrates, going backward can be extremely painful and even fails - NOT something for the average user.
If you have an addressbook which did not update to version 78, we need the details from you so the problem can be fixed. Send me a private message.
Modified by Wayne Mery
I'm running v76,3.2 on Win7. Just checked and I searched for abook.mab.bak - it's NOT on my drive - but abook.mab is - in a profile folder C:\Users\rh\AppData\Roaming\PostboxApp\Profiles\p655l05w.default - from when in my frustration I gave Postbox a try just on Sept 20th. My main complaint since installing Tbird on this laptop when my tower broke is that the address book is unpopulated, So I wonder if moving this abook,mab into my Tbird profile folder would restore the addresses. If I could only find the right profile folder!
Wayne, what details do you want and how can we access them?
rootazoid said
Wayne, what details do you want and how can we access them?
I would likely need to see
- prefs.js
- directory listing of the profile
- potentially address books (.bak and .mab)
Locking this topic - please file new topics for new issues. Thanks.