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Firrst off, I find I must be learning disabled when it comes to Firefox! I already mentioned the topic above, and someone emailed 2x from the f.f "Team" and wrote helpful info on WHY I might have gotten this red flag-still ain't sure right now, and last n. I tried the question in terms of the white flower.

  I got an auto info reply which matches what appears to be two profiles..there's one ff. on left with white flower, and 2nd on r. in mac dock with a heart!
  The 2nd, newer profile on r MUST be the new one it forced me to creat....

to me, this is like the scene in Star Wars when Luke Skywalker looks up at the two moons of Endor...unlike him, I am terrified to delete 2nd/neweer/heart account (which I created Thurs. night "mac 13"...b/c when it was created, it didn't have my bookmarks and p/w and I could NOT get the p/w s. and STILL can't import them back to classic/original profiel!!!!!!

The profile issue is thus 1) fear to delete 2nd newer "forced" profile, and 2nd is again, NO bookmarks in original once it forced me to make a 2nd profile.

The steps to get bookmarks are incredibly complicated...I DON"T KNOW WHY they were pushed out of the original, BUT HAVEN'T GOT ANY IN ALL PROFILE/SETTINGS/SAVED P/W'S I wasted Apple support help x 1 hr., and they have limits b/c 3rd party. Mac inro'd a "passords" feature in apps but there is no file (three letter --- type to reimport, I guess b/c they weren't in icloud-am not sure)!

  Where oh where have my p/w's gone...am I forced to go to another of my four macs and see if they're gone there too..I think so..haven't even checked the phone...UB HOW TO TYPE IN ALL P/W'S AGAIN MANUALLY IS A DRAG-AND THE INSTRUCTION SETS ON FIREFOX ARE OVERWHEMINGLY DIFFICULT!

Hi, I am extremely frustrated at my situation: I have a desktop (main computer), laptop and mobile phone all using Thunderbird, with a GMAIL account (IMAP) On my laptop I accidentally deleted the contents of the Archive (Thunderbird folder) and promptly ALL EMAILS AND HISTORY of emails wer LOST on said laptop. They subsequently disappeared on my mobile phone also. The delete action was also uploaded to GMAIL.com and I could not recover them there as it said I am using a different program. I then went on my desktop in offline mode and all my emails are there in Thunderbird (minus approx 5 days worth while the desktop remained offline (no big deal).

I have tried EVERYTHING to back up/export the profile from my desktop (while offline) and upload the mails onto my laptop to recover them and hopefully feed them to GMAIL. Nothing happens, they do not appear. I see all my emails within the thunderbird profile folder in a "IMAP.GMAIL.COM" folder but not in a "Mail" folder (is that relevant)? Is the laptop loading the emails then immediately deleting them, because it is syncing with GMAIL? I am so so lost. Please help. Thank you

Hi I had a systems crash and did a windows 10 reinstall. Windows created a folder windows.old. In the folder is users/"username"/appdata/local and roaming/thunderbird/profiles/ In the profiles folder for example I have a profile 34eu8280.2020. I transfered this folder to the newly installed thunderbird folder under roaming/thunderbird/profiles/ Next windows+r entered thunderbird-p. Create profile, entered 2020 as profile name, chose folder, entered 34u8280.2020, select folder, finish. In profile manager selected 2020, work offline, unchecked use selected profile without asking at startup, start thunderbird. Profile not showing up only account setup page.

At a lost as to how to proceed.

Any help would be appreciated in restoring profiles

Stan

It started with duplicate Archive and Drafts folders...so I checked TB help, and it gave me several suggestions, including going to my Profile folder and deleting duplicate folders from there. Everything seemed fine...until I realized that suddenly TB has NO emails later than 2022! I went in to Gmail to see if I could recover them...but they're all missing there as well. In my business account--also through Gmail, but managed through my domain name--not just my Inbox, but EVERYTHING is gone. It's as if I never existed.

This is extremely upsetting: I teach and have my own business, and losing all my emails is catastrophic.

Can someone please help?

I am in the process of transferring machines to a new machine for Win 11 At the same time, I have moved from an older version of Thunderbird to the latest version in the .esr release channel. I have now a new default profile with the thunderbird upgrade but want access to the data of the older profile. The older profile was running under an earlier version, release 140. Can I change the existing default profile to be the profile from the older thunderbird version and what are the implications

Unimportant and mildly disruptive issue: I've been using the about:profiles method to maintain separate profiles. I am aware that this is distinct from the new way to manage profiles (about:profilemanager; https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1543697 ).

I normally use my default profile (let's call it profile A) to open other profiles (of which there are 6 + a Nightly profile).

However, recently I've noticed that if I open another profile (B) from profile A: Refreshing profile A's about:profiles makes it inactive, with the "Another copy of Firefox has made changes to profiles" error. Now, B's about:profiles correctly displays the different profiles, and I can launch more profiles from here. But A is still shown as the default profile. I've tried this with a few other profiles (C, D), but even with those open, B still seems to have the functional about:profiles page.

Is there any way to reset this, i.e. to make A's about:profiles functional even when profile B is launched?

Edit: I think this is because profile B has the new profile manager enabled, and under this, B is the original profile. I tried setting browser.profiles.enabled to false in the about:config settings but this doesn't seem to help. Oh well!

I wish Firefox would realize that when working on this machine I am at work and my laptop is personal. I now have too many work things registered under my personal email. I am considering no longer using FireFox because the browser can't seem to be cognizant of work vs. personal.

I went through the process of importing all of my old profiles into the new profile manager and I, for one, am stoked that we are joining the big leagues with regards to profile management. This has been a feature that I have been waiting for for quite some time now. I have an extension that allows me to easily switch between the old profiles but a proper, built in solution was necessary.

That is until I launched Firefox the next day and was greeted with my work profile instead of my personal profile. I started digging through the settings and it seems that this is the intended default behavior for profiles. The last profile you had open is the profile that will open by default.

It's fine if the developers want that to be the default but what I also find strange is that I cannot, for the life of me, find a way to change this behavior on Windows. I found it on Linux (I think??) but I dont see a flag for it in the usual places. Maybe I missed it. That is why I am here.

1.) Is there a way to change this default behavior for the new profile manager? 2.) If not, can we plan to add that feature? Currently, this behavior makes the new profile system unusable for me because I need my browser to open to my personal profile when I open a new window.

I want to install Thunderbird on my new computer (Windows 11) from my old (Windows 10). But I cannot open the downloaded version of Thunderbird - it keeps saying there is no profile. Of course there is no profile before I have installed it! I de-installed and re-installed the Thunderbird program, but it keeps saying the same thing. How can I open Thunderbird to install the profile?

Hello,

I have a personal profile and a work profile on Firefox.

Both profiles have a short cut on the desktop to their webmails. At present when I double click either of the shortcuts, Firefox starts and presents the Windows to select the profile to use.

Is there some way to specify in each shortcut which profile it should use to open the webmail?

Thanks Neeraj

I have created two profiles using the new functionality that is accessed using the "hamburger" or three horizontal lines menu. I want to open one profile at times, but the other at different times. I can only specify a default profile for initial browser start, or to have the browser make me choose each time. Either of these options mean that I have to go through extra steps to launch any profile beside the default. This effectively makes the new profiles less useful to me than the profile manager that has been around for much longer.

Searching for help online has led me to several suggestions to create shortcuts that use the -P "profile name" switch for each profile. This is out of date because the profiles I can access from the command line bear no connection to the ones I have created as described in the above paragraph. They are only the ones I have created using the (old) profile manager from the profile manager in about:settings.

Did I miss something, in other words is it possible to do something similar with the new container profiles as I can with the original config profiles?

hi, if i sync 2 t/bird installs which one will install its personal data on the other pc?. the same question also applies to my f/fox install if anyone knows

win 10 tb145.02

thanks very much if anyone knows

Hello. We changed from the ESR channel to the regular release channel today by installing Thunderbird v146.0 (regular release version) over the top of our existing installation (which was the ESR version). The installation went fine and everything appears to be working perfectly. My only question is why the name of the profile didn't change. It still has a name of 'xxxxxxxx.default-esr'. I would have thought that the name would be changed to 'xxxxxxxx.default-release'. Is this something we should change, or should it be left alone. Thank you very much for your assistance.

I was positively surprised recently when the new Firefox profile manager (about:profilemanager) was introduced. https://www.tech2geek.net/how-to-use-the-new-updated-profile-manager-in-firefox-2025/ is an article about that.

However, I thought it's just a new visual UI with an in-browser switcher for the existing profiles (that I already had setup). However, it does not appear so.

The differences I see:

1. 1. 1. old profile management

• was managed by `about:profiles` or when starting FIrefox with `-P`
• is saved in `~/firefox` and the `profiles.ini` clearly and quite obviously mentions them there, so it's easy to manage them.

I also found this old support article: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles

1. 1. 1. new profile management

• automatically asks on startup if more than one profile exists
• is managed by `about:profilemanager` or with the Firefox burger menu
• seems to be saved in `~/.mozilla/firefox/Profile Groups` (Linux path here) in some .sqlite files, and I do not quite understand the format. Not mentioned in `profiles.ini`.
• also, when you change something here (even like opening a profile?), you cannot open `about:profiles` anymore, because it says "Some Firefox process has made changes to your profile, […] you need to restart Firefox", only after a restart further changes would be possible, which I find quite confusing but it also indicates somehow the features belong together?

And this seems to be the new one: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management#w_whats-the-difference-between-profiles-and-multi-account-containers

1. 1. Questions

• What are the differences here (I may have missed)?
• How can the new profile feature save so few files? Is it technically called "profile groups"?
• And the most important: How can I migrate an old profile? (In order to use the new features and GUI etc. I quite like)

Windows 11 Thunderbird 137.0.1

ARRRGGGH! I've been using Thunderbird for over 20 years and it's doing something new and BAD:

Every time I open it since yesterday, it keeps adding additional inboxes (7), drafts boxes (3), sent boxes (2) and junk boxes (6) and trash boxes (2). I don't know how to get rid of all of the extra folders. My profile is backed up, I just tried deleting the program and installing the latest version and it opened the profile (I thought it'd open a default profile and then I could reinstall the "real" profile). What's happening and how can I fix it? No, this does not have anything to do with multiple email accounts and I haven't added any new ones. Please help!

I set up Thunderbird on Debain 13 OS "Trixie" and then migrated (or tried to) my profiles.ini and attendant email folders to Ubuntu 24.04. I have done this before between Linux and even Windows installs, copying the folders over. Usually that is all you need to do to migrate emails and 'set up'. However, migrating from Debian to Ubuntu causes issues, namely the import is rejected by TB. At first, I thought perhaps Debian is using a newer version of Thunderbird and Ubuntu uses an older version, so I upgraded Thunderbird to a newer version. Import of profiles and folders still crash. This is using the profile import tool in TB.

I have a lot of emails via IMAP and it takes a long time to set them up and about ten gigs worth of emails. Is there anything that can be done?

Maybe a red herring: I was in the middle of doing a Documents folder backup when I decided to open Thunderbird for some reason. Got an Unable to Load Profile type of message. And my attempts at a fix seem to just send me further down a rabbit hole. I started out by renaming my profile.ini file, but I really didn't know what the heck I was doing and possibly caused more harm than good. Then I tried to find my profile file/folder itself, using the Thunderbird > Troubleshooting > Profile Folder path and doing an import from inside TBird but that ended up with various problems such as drilling down to the profile folder from within TBird but then when I clicked Select Folder in Thunderbird, that didn't trigger any sort of import.

I also spent a good deal of time trying to find my AppData folder, finally being able to view it (a hidden folder, apparently), and saw several recently-dated profile types of folders, but again, I couldn't manage to "hook up" any of those folder/files from starting inside TBird and selecting Import... I ended up just stuck inside a folder, not triggering any Importing activity.

Finally I found a profile folder (5yed...) at a higher level on my PC than inside that long AppData Roaming Thunderbird path. THIS profile was inside: D:\DOCS\Thunderbird\Profiles

Now THAT folder I managed to get an Import to trigger. But the result was an Error Message telling me to go find my Error Console. Can you please see the attached Error Code display screengrab and tell me there's hope that this was at least the right file but just poor results that I can fix somehow???

The following is my copy/paste of the text I see in the Error Console display that's in my screengrab after trying to import the above 5yed... profile, in case it helps you see it better:

1765349209272 addons.xpi WARN Checking C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Thunderbird\distribution\extensions for addons WebGL context was lost. 2 Troubleshoot.sys.mjs:727:17 Content-Security-Policy: This site (https://www.mozilla.org) has a Report-Only policy without a report-uri directive nor a report-to directive. CSP will not block and cannot report violations of this policy. thunderbird downloadable font: Glyph bbox was incorrect (glyph ids 441 459 695) (font-family: "Open Sans" style:normal weight:700 stretch:100 src index:0) source: https://updates.thunderbird.net/media/fonts/opensans-bold.woff2 downloadable font: Glyph bbox was incorrect (glyph ids 459) (font-family: "Open Sans" style:normal weight:400 stretch:100 src index:0) source: https://updates.thunderbird.net/media/fonts/opensans-regular.woff2 Uncaught (in promise) NS_ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND: Component returned failure code: 0x80520012 (NS_ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND) [nsIFile.copyTo]

   _recursivelyCopyMsgFolder resource:///modules/ThunderbirdProfileImporter.sys.mjs:652
   _recursivelyCopyMsgFolder resource:///modules/ThunderbirdProfileImporter.sys.mjs:661
   _mergeLocalFolders resource:///modules/ThunderbirdProfileImporter.sys.mjs:634
   _importServersAndAccounts resource:///modules/ThunderbirdProfileImporter.sys.mjs:243

ThunderbirdProfileImporter.sys.mjs:652

Also attached below are also:

• a screengrab of a set of profiles I found, but when I drilled down to them from within TBird's Import selections and clicked Select Folder, as far as I got was an open folder, or something like that.
• Thunderbird's Troubleshooting Info "Profile Folder" path.
• Message telling me to see the Error Console. The message appeared right after I tried importing the profile that's stated in TBird's Troubleshooting Info "Profile Folder" path.

Here's the copy/paste of the Error Console message display after my try at importing the profile that is in the path that TBird's Troubleshooting Info page "Profile Folder" states (maybe it's the same as my 5yed...profile import try's Error Console display, dunno:

1765353636640 addons.xpi WARN Checking C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Thunderbird\distribution\extensions for addons Content-Security-Policy: This site (https://www.mozilla.org) has a Report-Only policy without a report-uri directive nor a report-to directive. CSP will not block and cannot report violations of this policy. thunderbird WebGL context was lost. 2 Troubleshoot.sys.mjs:727:17 downloadable font: Glyph bbox was incorrect (glyph ids 441 459 695) (font-family: "Open Sans" style:normal weight:700 stretch:100 src index:0) source: https://updates.thunderbird.net/media/fonts/opensans-bold.woff2 downloadable font: Glyph bbox was incorrect (glyph ids 459) (font-family: "Open Sans" style:normal weight:400 stretch:100 src index:0) source: https://updates.thunderbird.net/media/fonts/opensans-regular.woff2 Uncaught (in promise) NS_ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND: Component returned failure code: 0x80520012 (NS_ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND) [nsIFile.copyTo]

   _recursivelyCopyMsgFolder resource:///modules/ThunderbirdProfileImporter.sys.mjs:652
   _recursivelyCopyMsgFolder resource:///modules/ThunderbirdProfileImporter.sys.mjs:661
   _mergeLocalFolders resource:///modules/ThunderbirdProfileImporter.sys.mjs:634
   _importServersAndAccounts resource:///modules/ThunderbirdProfileImporter.sys.mjs:243

ThunderbirdProfileImporter.sys.mjs:652

Thanks for any help in getting through this.