Thunderbird Community Forum

Hi, hoping someone could help as I am struggling to get my information back. I am using Ubuntu Cinnamon.

Thunderbird crashed last night, wouldn't work, tried safe mode. Nothing fixed it. It hung when opening up and after 30 seconds said force quit. So I was forced to reinstall. I did a manual backup but not using the inbuilt tool as I couldn't get into Thunderbird. I just copied the data from username/.thunderbird

After spending a long time uninstalling. Because it reached 78% and then crashed on uninstall. Eventually after reading various pages on the internet I managed to reinstall from the Ubuntu software manager using the latest snap version. (Which I am not sure was what was actually installed previously).

However having used thunderbird for nearly 20 years or so. I have a username/.thunderbird folder. And when I moved to this platform, I have a snap/thunderbird/common/.thunderbird folder.

I installed this new distro 2 years ago, and remember having issues getting my data into the system under Snap. But eventually got it to work somehow back then.

However since reinstalling I cannot see the last 2 years of emails, archives or data. It has launched into a 2 year old profile. I appear to have lost most of the emails from the archive folders (but kept the folders) removed all of the personal folders but then dumped all those emails into my inbox. Giving me 6500 emails that were in various personal folders. (I don't get 6500 emails in a year so don't know what has happened.) It has even changed all of the new dates to the US format, so nothing makes any sense.

I now have 2 Thunderbird profiles, over 12GB in size. And have apparently lost 2 years of my life. But reading support pages, suggests I should be okay because thunderbird doesn't delete data when you reinstall?

I have looked through various other threads which talk about pointing it at the profiles and mail boxes, however nothing works.

Any help much needed.

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!