Thunderbird Community Forum

I inadvertently deleted a mail sub folder named Shopping Oder Confirmations I found the folder in my acronis backup and copied it to my desktop I then pasted it in to the profile window of thunderbird in hopes that when i restarted it would show up in my mail folders which it did not I can send you screen shots of the different windows where I dropped the folder Can you help please?! There is tons of information in these folders I reference often. Thank you! BTW I did just make a donation :)

Hello people, I've just upgraded my Thinderbird because my inbox didn't load on opening the programme. I guess I have made a huge mistake somewhere in the process, because my whole archive has disappeared. I very much hope it still exists somewhere and that I will be able to restore it with your help. Thanking you in advance, Nele Ysebaert, Amsterdam

My Thunderbird (windows) is really not working, so I want to reinstall the whole thing. I have 4 accounts and a local folder. I don't want to backup all the profiles before reinstalling, as I am having an annoying issue with g-mail (I don't HAVE a gmail any more, but Thunderbird wants to login to gmail every time I open it). I only want to backup the "local" folder, as, so I want to reinstall the accounts one by one from scratch. In that way I hope, I can purge Thunderbird of the gmail. Now the question: How do I backup the local folder in a way that makes it easy to import it back after all the reinstallment?

I have Thunderbird on the old computer. For twenty+ years I have read the instructions for moving it to the new computer. i cannot understand/am not at all confident in my ability AND I have only ONE keyboard/mouse. I have to move it from one computer to the other to operate them.

Right now all email is on the old computer, no email is on the new computer. No email has ever been on my cellular telephone. One set of periforals - keyboard/mouse.

I DO have the Bravura, the Plugable transfer cable and accompanying software, and many other things came across, but not the Thunderbird.

I want to do the move/installation correctly so that not one stored email is lost or corrupted.

I need help.

Hi,

I need some help! Thunderbird used to have archive settings in which I could choose to save my e-mails locally in my archive folders with 1 file per 1 email and not everything that's in a folder saved to a single file.

How can I get this back? Is there some hidden settings that can be accessed to get it done?

I need every email in one file! I'm going nuts trying to sort years of e-mail duplicates. If I can have a file per message, then I can at least use my PC duplicate file program to compare file content and find the similar ones. But with everything of one folder in the same archive file I'll be cursed to have to manually go through thousands of e-mails by hand! So if there is a way to return the previous archive format (*wdseml files??, it seems?) then I want to know how to set that setting.

Alternatively a local folder duplicate e-mail cleaning tool? There used to be some but I couldn't get it to work now!

I'm changing email servers and need the best way to automatically backup my complete(multiple domains and user accounts) emails in thunderbird to a separate drive or local machine before changing servers. I would prefer an automated way to do this so I can continue to update backup file routinely

I already back up my profile regularly to a remote drive

Thank you in advance for any help you can give.

Back when W110 went to w11 I got a new computer and was given great directions here to back up my TB profile by searching %appdata% and copy the thunderbird folder to external source. That file is 198 MB. I do this every month now ..It is my understanding it saves my profile and all emails including local ones. Now in Aug 2026 when i copy this file, I am getting an error a file is too long and have no choice but to skip that file..I will attach a pic of the error. Is this back up ok to use or is it corrupt because of the error?

I also found in TB help there is an export feature in TB to a zip file but that .zip is huge..I did one just in case. I think you just open TB>select hamburger menu three lines on top right>tools>export. I did that back up/export also today and that is a .zip file folder that is less properties like 175 MB.

So now which way is the correct way to keep a safe copy of my TB in case my computer crashes or i have to put on another pc?

I have removed the drive from the computer that will not boot up. I hope to be able to transfer my "profile" to my new computer from that drive. I understand that I will need to have the same version of Thunderbird installed on my new computer in order to transfer my "profile". Since I can't access Thunderbird on my "crashed" computer, how can I know what version I had installed previously? How do I find where to load that version on my new computer?

TB will import but does not display either legible emails nor attachments. I suspect GM at is fault. The takeouts seem incomplete at Zip 11GB. There are 2407 emails in my simple GM account a few with always Adobe PDF legal document attachments. I am new to Thunderbird so that may be a contributor but it looks very straight forward. Perhaps I am a moronic 82? I represent 11,000 disabled Firefighters pro bono in UK and Ireland. Grateful for any help please...Paul

Purchased new laptop. Used export tool in Thunderbird to external HD. Traded in old laptop. Installed Thunderbird & attempted to import my email profile. Import tool requires zip file, but the only file on my external HD is a .default file. I'm getting new email but none of my old emails. Consulted Best Buy Geek & he determined the import tool didn't work properly because the export was missing required files. We further determined the export backup must not have worked properly.

Old PC died and will not start up. I bought a new PC and was able to recover most file in the initiating the new desktop. I installed Mozilla Thunderbird on the new PC, but when I opened it only 55 EMAILS were available with the oldest being about 2 weeks old dating back to July 16, 2026. Is there a time limit for maintaining EMAILS online? Also, all of my contacts and Calendar events are not available.

I had created several folders to save important EMAILS and none of those sub-folders are visible to me. How do I get to those folders and EMAILS? Contacts and calendar are not as important, but they were used all of the time to communicate and stay on schedule

I tried to import using the tool provided, but received the following message: Import failed unexpectedly, more information may be available in the error console.

I have lots of important information that I can't access!

Help

I have an old(er) Thunderbird file - we were not able to get the system running so we just plugged in the hard drive and zipped it (not with Thunderbird, just zipped the raw files - see attached) and I have tried all three methods that Gemini spit out to me (#3 looks like what I have seen on the forums here) and the bext I can do is get the first message to pop up (out of about 500+) and can't see the others. Using Thunderbird on the new machine and also tried the ImportNG tool as well. I can't loose this collection, very important. Although the old machine does not work, I still have access to the hard drive if I need more "stuff" off of it. Not sure what the old version of Thunderbird was but the box was last used in Jan 2019 and setup originally around 2008. Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Hello dear forum Here are the details: Account type: Microsoft Exchange (via OWL) Antivirus software and firewall used: Bitdefender I have the following problem: I copied the mbox files from the active account (profile) to Local Folders (as described in some forums), both with and without *.msf files (seems this makes no difference to the problem). Then I start Thunderbird, and all folders and subfolders appear in Local Folders. However, when I go into one of these copied folders or subfolders, it only displays a single email. The copied folder is the same size as the original, but no other emails are displayed, and this is repeated in every subfolder. I employed the repair function with no result. The import/export tool NG only copies half of the emails. The total is 4.25 GB. I can only copy the emails manually via copy/paste, but this is very error-prone and takes a very long time. Has anyone had experience copying mbox files and managed to do it successfully? I would be very grateful for any advice.

I have installed Thunderbird in my new computer and moved the entire contents, accounts, etc. from the old one to the new one. Alas the Local Folders did not follow. Therefore to move my Local Folders from Thunderbird in one computer to another I have followed the following procedure:

On the old computer, go to Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Folder and click Open Folder.Exit Thunderbird.Open the Mail folder, then enter the Local Folders directory.Locate the large files without extensions (e.g., Inbox, Archive) and any corresponding folders ending in .sbd.Copy these files to your USB drive.

I do not know where I should put these folders in my new computer so that they will appear under Local Folders in my new computer.

I have downloaded the latest version of Thunderbird. The old computer uses Windows 10 and the new Windows 11. I have put the folders on the desktop of my new computer pending the reply to where I should put them so that they appear in Local Folders.

Thank you for your reply.

Thunderbird was running on a laptop that has become suspect. Copied the files to a desktop machine. Tried to access these file from the app on the laptop. Only new message are available. All old inbox, sent, other folders, trash, etc. are missing. Tried to go back to the laptop files, but the results are the same.

Running Windows 11 on both machines.

Is there any way to get my data back?

Thanks, Robert

This morning I noticed that all emails prior to May 1 were missing from folders that I created. I assumed (incorrectly) that they were in the sbd file that I backed up in April. So I moved that file into the proper destination location but nothing popped up. I then restored the old sbd file back and now I don't even see any the the folders that I created. Note: when I click on the sbd file I do see the folders but they don't appear under Local Folders I've googled and used AI....no luck

Hi, I have followed the instructions for incoming and outgoing servers to convert my Juno Webmail to AN MBOX FORMAT and bring it over to Thunderbird. However, it is not syncing up to Thunderbird and bringing in all of my old emails from Juno.

Any help you can offer with this situation would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

Carla

From my local folder of emails in Thunderbird, I am able to extract to .CSV and see fields in Excel. While date and time and sender and receiver and subject fields work successfully I don't see the email body coming through. How do I achieve this please?

I managed to append switch values to get the Time field included as part of my extract but the email bogy, or even a truncated part of it eludes me. I understand that some of my email body fields are substantial but currently my repeated exports show nothing. Formats other than CSV would be welcome if they can solve my problem.