Why did an update to 91.3.2 just WIPE OUT all my email accounts ?
I just did an update on my Win10 desktop and ALL MY email accounts disappeared. There were about 8 accounts and now Thunderbird is telling me to create a new account. And if I look in the Profile directory EVERYTHING is GONE. The Home page says it is 91.3.2, which is not the latest as I am running 91.4.0 on my WIn10 laptop.
WHAT HAPPENED and HOW CAN I FIX IT ?
And if you think it was a virus you need to contact Norton as their online active scan didn't report anything (I am running a full system scan right now).
One wicked unhappy user !
All Replies (4)
September 2019 I wrote this post because I was sick of answering questions on the topic. https://thunderbirdtweaks.blogspot.com/2019/09/i-lost-my-profilemail-on-update-to.html
Matt, Looked at about:profiles under Help=>More Troubleshooting Information->Application Basics and it shows 2 Profiles that are both dated the day the Update occurred, one being a default. Both are basically empty, like you get on a new install. The question is then where did my original Profile go ? It does not appear to be anywhere on my system.
Question 2. I have TB on my desktop and laptop. Both are running 91.4.0 (but one is 64 bit the other 32 bit). If I copy the Contents of the Profile from my laptop to my desktop, what do you believe is the probability of success ?
Matt, Answer to Question 2 is YES. Copied the contents from the good profile to the bad profile (except the directories in ImapMail, just copied the msf files). Changed the entries in profiles.ini to match and TB came up with the correct accounts. Of course it wants to download thousands of messages, but that is fine. STILL don't know what happened, but I am up and running. Will be careful and make sure everything is backed up before the next update (I always tell it to ask). If you have any other ideas let me know as I would like to figure this out. 35 years doing software QA makes you that way.
MSF files as nothing but indexes and have no intrinsic value. In fact they are frequently deleted to fix other issues with message display.
When copying copy everything. Including IMAPmail, they will repopulate in theory, but mass re-download of mail from the server can have other unintended consequences, like maxing out your daily bandwidth allocation so mail simply stops working for 24 hours.. It is not as if putting a copy on a USB takes much time or effort.
Copying everything including the profiles.ini file is a good idea.
on windows simply replace the %appdata% \Thunderbird structure in it's entirety.
Note: about:profiles shows what is registered in the profiles.ini. Did you chance the relevant location in the file system to see if a third folder was located in profiles.