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Hi I am an older person and have lost my profiles on thunderbird email - one is [redacted]@xtra.co.nz and the other is [redacted]@xtra.co.nz. We are in NZ and accidently deleted the Thunderbird profile and not the corrupted new profile I was setting up. Thank you. Gloria Sandbrook. I still have [redacted]@xtra.co.nz on my phone for communication. Cheers.

I have posted another question about my corrupted TB profile and restoring it. Having done the restore and looked through the profile folder it is clear that this is full of old files that are no longer supported/needed.

Is there a utility that removes these old files?

I'm not sure if TB updates should remove them but it doesn't appear to have done so.

When I read https://kb.mozillazine.org/Files_and_folders_in_the_profile_-_Thunderbird it is clear that there are so many of these that doing it manually would be prone to error. That resource also says it does not know what some of the files actually do.

Is there a better resource that lists just the latest files maintained by Mozilla?

If I do a new export does it only export the files it needs? The last time I ran an export the resulting zip did not contain all the files from the TB installation but I have no idea why.

I have copied Thunderbird folder from C:users\maris\AppData\roaming on old PC. Had it working on the new PC, but it suffered an unrecoverable error during a windows update after only five days. Other reinstalled apps now running OK, but have been unable to replicate the successful installation from a few days ago. Found additional profiles in profiles.ini and deleted them. Made no difference!

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

I am using Thunderbird 140.15.0esr and have noticed that my Ashampoo Backup is not able to store my Thunderbirs files any more. I have looked up how to find the Thunderbird files and the posts mainly say :

C:\Users\<YourUsername>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\

But when I follow this path there is no Thunderbird folder in Roaming as shown in the attached screen shot

Can you help please.

Ian Hulley

I have an email account that I have had for several years and I run it under Thunderbird. I have recently opened a Gmail account and understand that I can operate this under the same Thunderbird (I haven't tried it yet so expect a few glitches on the way, as per usual! There are plenty of articles covering this, so I live in hope)! Potential problem is: I have backed up my old profile account regularly and know how to do it (though I've not yet had to restore it and of course hope I never will), What worries me is that if I follow the procedure to add Gmail to my Thunderbird (and it works), will I get a single profile covering both email accounts which I will be able to back up in the way I am used to; or will I get 2 profiles including a new one for Gmail so I will need to back up both? A simple question but I haven't seen the answer anywhere yet!

John Wilson (john @wilson48.plus.com)

Hi, I have multiple profiles on my computer. How do I make sure all emails on the older profiles is on my profile I am now using? I would like to delete old profile 16+gb but want to make sure all emails are in the profile I am presently using. I think all emails are in present profile but would like to make sure. I have other older profiles but they are small in size. Trying to recover some disk space on my ssd.

Previously, when I clicked on the Firefox profile icon, it showed all 4 profiles at once. Now it only shows 3 initially, and to access the 4th one I have to click "All Profiles" and then select the specific profile. Is there a way to make it show all 4 profiles together again, like before?

bonjour, J'ai installé un nouveau profil, mais j'arrive pas a utiliser l'icone -sélectionner messages à droite au dessus des mails- appliquer ces paramètres/la vue... Ca me serai utile pour simplifier et unifier mes affichages. Actuellement j'observe aucune changement, bug ou erreur de manip.

Helping a friend with her HP-i3 PC running Windows 11 that I setup in March of 2025. It was a new PC purchased from BestBuy in March 2025.

I had to restore the image backup of her C drive that I did in March 2025 because of a Windows problem that I wasn't able to resolve. Now that problem is resolved but Tbird has the old profile folder without her new email contacts. (Unfortunately, I did not remember to use Tbird to save a backup of her profile folder before doing the restore.)

She has a recent image backup so I can extract Tbird's profile folder from that backup. What would be the correct procedure to replace the current profile folder with the one extracted from the recent backup?

(don't currently have access to her PC so don't know the version number of Tbird currently installed)

Trying to solve aperformance problem I tried to move my profile from C:\Users\Peter and Carol\Profiles\sjig3laj.default to "C:\Users\Profile\." -- when that did not work, I was unable tomove back to the original location, TB telling me "Local directory path ... is not suitable for message storage". How do I get back to the config that worked before ? (was just slow)

I installed Thunderbird on my new laptop, then imported the profile from my old laptop

The main screen has, under "Inbox", folders for Drafts, Sent, Trash, Archive and Spam, which are being used by the program

Folders for Drafts, Sent and Trash also appear under "Local Folders" (along with Outbox) and these aren't being used by the program.

How do I get rid of these duplicate folders? "Spam" had a delete option, so that was easy, but the others don't.

I tried the two suggestions for a previous "Duplicates" question but they didn't resolve things.

Thank you

Hi, I'm running FF 149.0 (64-bit) on Windows 11. I've used profiles for a while now and on several occassions I've "lost profiles". Currently I have three profiles which I set up and edited the icon and colour associated with each. When I launch FF I see the Profile Manager and can select any of the three and I can create a new profile which shows here. However, once in any one of the FF profiles I don't see the others - by which I mean that when I go via the hamburger lines top right and click on the current profile, the 'other profiles' section is blank. I also cannot edit the profile from using the edit pencil top right (after clicking the hamburger lines and clicking on the current profile), it takes me to about:editprofile but the page is completely blank. Confusingly, if I go to about:profiles I see two profiles, neither of which shows up in the Profile Manager! I'm going round in circles trying to understand where to edit my exisitng profiles and make sense of the five profiles that don't all show up in the same place!

Lost my original FF profile when I created a new 2nd profile. Opened FF. clicked profile icon. in drop down menu, I clicked on " create new profile". Set color, skipped most of the rest,then "set default browser to Firefox" using the button in FF dialog box, NOt Windows settings. Found and clicked on box " choose profile at startup". CLosed all instances of FF. Opened FF, box saying choose profile does not show my original profile, only the new one.

Help? I need to get back to my original profile, and keep the new one as choice at startup. How do I do this?

My computer recently updated to Thunderbird 155.0. The Local Folders did not move along with all my contacts. I have backed up mu Local Folders and contacts into a file into a file. Using the forum I have cut and pasted all of these into the Local Folder in the new Thunderbird but they are not there in the new Thunderbird. Please explain how to restore them in the new Thunderbird. I would suppose i will have the same issue with Address Books and would appreciate help there as well. Many thanks for your help!

TB guidance is to maintain separate profiles for dual-booting (Kubuntu and Win11), rather than sharing the profile. That adds to IMAP churn, but also to disk space, of course. But the biggest concern is keeping Local Folders (a very large archive which is by far the largest part of my profile) coordinated: both sides must access the same Local Folders.

The option to specify "Message Storage" for Local Folders obviously addresses that problem: both Kubuntu and Win11 can have the same NTFS Local Folders storage. At the same time, each IMAP account also has the option to specify its own "Message Storage" "Local Directory" location outside of the profile folder. That suggests two obvious questions:

1. Why not specify shared storage for each account, as well as for Local Folders?
2. After Local Folders and all accounts are shared, then precisely what, from each profile, cannot be shared between Kubuntu and Windows? Does this bring us back to asking why the profile cannot simply be shared?

[Years ago, when my email accounts were POP, I had no problem sharing a profile between WinXP and an earlier Ubuntu variant. (Of course with POP, they had to share.) Is today's separate-profiles guidance related to IMAP accounts or to some other change in TB design?]