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Lost Email Accounts and local folders in Thunderbird

1945thebug1945
1945thebug1945
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I use Thunderbird as my email program on desktop. It was receiving and sending messages from both my Gmail and Yahoo email accounts, and I had set up local folders on the Yahoo account. I used the program earlier and then closed it. When I opened it again a few minutes later it opened to a Home screen that asked me to set up my account. What happened to the account(s) I was using? I looked at similar occurrences on the forum, but these seemed to deal with folders disappearing, not whole accounts. I had lots of historical emails stored by the program that I don't want to lose. I noticed under the C:....Users/{my name}/appdata/roaming/Thunderbird/profiles that there was a new profile established today, which I copied to another folder and then deleted from the location. After that, Thunderbird wouldn't open at all, saying that my profile could not be located. I tried copying the deleted profile back into the location, but that didn't seem to work (one pane shows it is there, but another doesn't), so I guess my "tinkering" has messed things up even further. Any help would be appreciated.

I use Thunderbird as my email program on desktop. It was receiving and sending messages from both my Gmail and Yahoo email accounts, and I had set up local folders on the Yahoo account. I used the program earlier and then closed it. When I opened it again a few minutes later it opened to a Home screen that asked me to set up my account. What happened to the account(s) I was using? I looked at similar occurrences on the forum, but these seemed to deal with folders disappearing, not whole accounts. I had lots of historical emails stored by the program that I don't want to lose. I noticed under the C:....Users/{my name}/appdata/roaming/Thunderbird/profiles that there was a new profile established today, which I copied to another folder and then deleted from the location. After that, Thunderbird wouldn't open at all, saying that my profile could not be located. I tried copying the deleted profile back into the location, but that didn't seem to work (one pane shows it is there, but another doesn't), so I guess my "tinkering" has messed things up even further. Any help would be appreciated.

All Replies (2)

david
david
  • Top 10 Contributor
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You state there was a new profile there. Was there another one? That would have been the 'right' one. TB didn't start because c:\users\(yourID)\appdata\roaming\thunderbird\profiles.ini was pointing to the profile you deleted. So, when TB attempted to start, the profile wasn't there. If the correct profile was located, all you have to do is open that profiles.ini (simple text file - Notepad will work fine) and change the Path statement (there are several - make them all the same) to point to the correct profile. Watch your spelling to get it right. Assuming the profile is there, you have now fixed the issue.

jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Avast/AVG users are getting an alert about their prefs.js file, which stores important custom settings for Mozilla software. If you use Avast/AVG, the file may have been quarantined in the past few hours.

It's not yet clear exactly what is triggering the detection, so it's a bit soon to sound an all clear to restore that file from quarantine (if that is an option). Hopefully we'll know more soon.