Thunderbird Community Forum

I am installing Thunderbird for the first time on a new win 11 box. During the install, a "special" email account was created (not by me). I would rather not have the account, but when I right click on the account, the "delete" option is not there, and the account description (immediately below Account Settings) is "The following is a special account. There are no identities associated with it.". Is it possible to delete this account or at least hide it on the accounts list?

I did an uninstall/reinstall hoping to start over, but that did not do a complete reset, and the new install came up with the same accounts (including the "special") as I had set up before.

So, can I remove the account from the existing install, or can you tell me how to do a "clean" reinstall that forgets all previous account information?

After new installation I want to use my profile of the former installation. In principle I followed the procedure of the article "An einem anderen Ort wiederherstellen". After that when starting thunderbird it always asks me to create a new account.

Does anyone know what is missing?

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.

Hello, I urgently need help recovering emails and archive folders that have disappeared from Thunderbird.

Here is what happened: I had an email account configured in Thunderbird using POP3. Over the years, all the emails and the entire email history were downloaded and stored locally in Thunderbird. I also had several archive folders containing important emails and documents.

The mailbox was recently moved from the old mail server to a new mail server using IMAP. The account was then set up again in Thunderbird as a new IMAP account.

The old POP3 account/configuration was left untouched, because I expected the old emails and folders stored locally in Thunderbird to remain available.

However, after setting up the new IMAP account, I can no longer see the previous email history or the archive folders from the old POP3 account. Some of these folders contain very important documents that I need to recover.

I would like to emphasize that I am not asking to recover emails from the old mail server. The emails and archives had previously been downloaded and stored locally in Thunderbird through the POP3 configuration.

Could you please help me determine, how I can locate and restore the old Thunderbird profile or Local Folders? The emails and archive folders are very important, so I would really appreciate detailed instructions on how to safely recover them. I have not intentionally deleted the old emails or archive folders.

Technical information: Email address: biuro@wojciechprzybylski.pl Old mail server: server.go4win.pl Old account type: POP3 Approximate date of the migration: 15.09,2026 Missing folders/emails: Archiwum

Thank you very much for your help.

Best regards, Halina Kaczyńska

Essentially, I want to back up my Thunderbird. The standard way seems to be via Export / Import, but there is an implied limit of 2GB. The export function has successfully ended and produced a file of 15GB. Can I rely on this? (In the sense of being able to Import it should I need to?

Thanks in advance for any help / advice you can give.

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 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.

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)

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!

Hello. Thanks in advance. I spent a couple of long evenings deleting a few thousand sent emails from Thunderbird in order to free up some memory on my notebook computer and then intended to create a new backup profile. However, when I tried to do so using the Thunderbird Export tool an "unexpected error" occurred and I discovered that there was no longer a Thunderbird profile folder in Windows/Users/[my name]/appdata/Roaming or Local. When I used the Troubleshooting Information tool to look for the folder under Application Basics/Profile Folder, clicking on 'Open Folder' did nothing. The location is seemingly 'unavailable' for no apparent reason. Thunderbird still opens and closes normally, I can send and receive emails and all my emails are still there. I have an older backup profile stored on a removable disc, but it pre-dates the mass deletion of sent emails. My question is: if I install Thunderbird on a different PC and import this older backup profile, I presume all the emails I've just painstakingly deleted off my PC will reappear, but can Thunderbird connect to the server and download my stored emails as they were most recently saved (without the thousands of unwanted sent emails) so I can create an up-to-date profile? Thanks in advance for any advice.

When I opened Thunderbird two days ago it came up with the following message: To use your current email address, fill in your credentials. Thunderbird will automattically search for working and recommended server configurations. It asked for Full Name; Email: and Password. Fearing it was a scam I filled in my server settings manually. My server is Centurylink but my email address is embarqmail.com so when I filled in my info the send was smpt.centurylink.net port 587 (which was fine) The problem was with receive: I guess my old setup was pop.embarqmail.com port 110 and I put in pop.centurylink.net port 995 which is what Centurylink's website called for. Well this one worked and it downloaded 800 messages but no saved folders and the Thunderbird screen layout looks different from the one I am used to. A few minutes later the pop.embarqmail setup downloaded the same messages but still no saved messages. It looks like I have 2 profiles. Did the last one I entered override the old and wipe out files I had stored. Is there a fix for this mess I have created and can I retreive my old folders and messages? I tried doing a system restore and it didn't work due to corrupted files. Oh, I'm still using windows 7. Thanks

Copilot has prepared a message for me: Subject: Thunderbird always loads corrupted profile and ignores new profiles

Message:

Thunderbird is stuck loading the same corrupted profile and always shows the welcome screen, even when I create new profiles.

I used the Profile Manager via thunderbird.exe -p and created new profiles (“Clean” and “Clean2”). Both profile folders exist in %APPDATA%\Thunderbird\Profiles. However, Thunderbird still launches the same original profile every time.

Even when I select “Clean2” in the Profile Manager (with “Use the selected profile without asking” unchecked), Thunderbird ignores the selection and loads the old profile. Safe Mode (thunderbird.exe -safe-mode) also does not disable the welcome module.

This appears to be a profiles.ini corruption or a profile lock issue, because Thunderbird is not switching profiles even though the Profile Manager shows the correct selection.

Could you advise how to repair or reset the profile configuration so Thunderbird will actually load a new profile?

Thank you.

I have a previous Thunderbird account, which resides on another computer. On my current Desktop, I downloaded Thunderbird, went to open and it says "Your Thunderbird profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible." I went this route because my original Thunderbird has many customized Files to which I put emails into. I can't figure out how to recreate that profile as your instructions are quite impossible to follow. Remember, most of your users are like me, a bit under the standard as far as programming skills. So, how do I get either: my original profile to be imported to my new computer, or, better, just open my new Thunderbird so I can use a different, newer set of email addresses? This is my preference. Please advise.

I have a profile set that uses IMAP and need to change this to POP. I have tried changing the settings and tried creating a new profile by exporting folders and files but nothing is working correctly.

One problem I have is that in the IMAP profile I now have a second email address that is the same address name but is a POP setup. This is confusing. When I use the POP email to export and then import into a new profile I again get two email addresses in the folder panel of the new profile and one of them does have folders but they are empty.

Below is a screen shot of the original IMAP Profile. The upper address has folders but they are now blank because I pasted them in the lower address. I have tried selecting/highlighting the lower address for exporting but when I do I get the two addresses but the folders are empty/blank.

Thank you for any help!

Rick

I'm getting frequent popup messages from McAfee, my email threat detector, that they've detected and stopped a threat, but none is identified. McAfee's chatbot wants me to create a new profile and add my email accounts to that profile. Will I lose access to all my currently saved email messages and calendar information?