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Need help with recovering a very old Thunderbird Profile backup

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  • Last reply by sfhowes

eastc
eastc
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I've got an old profile (old emails) that I'm trying to resurrect. I don't know how old this profile is but 5+years isn't unreasonable and possibly closer to 10. I have the old Profiles directory backed up. Backed up as a copy (not as an export or zip). I've not been able to get Thunderbird to load the messages however.

I've tried the various instructions for creating new profiles, pointing to the directory, editing the profiles.ini (both relatively=1 and explictly=0) and I don't see the messages showing up. The existing documentation doesn't seem to cover whatever problem I'm running into.

I'm not seeing error messages show up either so I'm not sure what to do at this point. Any recommendations on what I can do to try to recover these old emails? I see the headers are there but the body is ?compressed?. It's not std ascii.

Thank you.

I've got an old profile (old emails) that I'm trying to resurrect. I don't know how old this profile is but 5+years isn't unreasonable and possibly closer to 10. I have the old Profiles directory backed up. Backed up as a copy (not as an export or zip). I've not been able to get Thunderbird to load the messages however. I've tried the various instructions for creating new profiles, pointing to the directory, editing the profiles.ini (both relatively=1 and explictly=0) and I don't see the messages showing up. The existing documentation doesn't seem to cover whatever problem I'm running into. I'm not seeing error messages show up either so I'm not sure what to do at this point. Any recommendations on what I can do to try to recover these old emails? I see the headers are there but the body is ?compressed?. It's not std ascii. Thank you.

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sfhowes
sfhowes
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Look for the mbox files in the old profile, in Mail/<popservername>, ImapMail/<imapservername> and Mail/Local Folders, and in sbd subdirectories. They are the large files with no extension, named after folders, e.g. Inbox, Sent, Archive... Each mbox has a .msf index file.

Copy the mbox files, renaming if necessary, to Mail/Local Folders in the current profile, while TB is closed (ignore the .msf files). Restart TB, and you should see the folders under Local Folders in the Folder Pane.