Thunderbird Community Forum

bold textI recently had my computer get stuck in the "automatic repair" loop making it impossible to boot up. I restored a several months old back up onto a different hard drive. I can boot on the new hard drive, but Thunderbird is missing several months of e-mails. I have tried importing from the old hard disk, but IT DOES NOT WORK. Alll it does is create a new "Local Folders" with nothing in it. I have tried exporting the old profile to a zip file, but it is 14 GB, more than Thunderbird can handle. How can I import the old e-mails into the working version of Thunderbird on the new hard drive. Please, do not say "use the import function" as i have already found it does not work.

Windows 10 became unavailable, but I have a copy of the drive it was on. I had tried to install Linux Mint as dual boot and couldn't get to Windows any more. Installed Linux Mint 22 on that drive, wiping out everything that was on it. Now I really want to get all of my locally saved items from the copy of the old drive onto TB in LM22. The profile folders are there, I just don't know what to do with them. FYI, all of my other data files were on other hard drives, so only the OS and apps were on the boot drive.

Hello all:

Transferring Thunderbird from the system above to the system noted above. Follow the instructions from here on the Mozilla Support page (copied both "Thunderbird" directories into the Roaming and Local destination directories. When the destination machine installation opens, it is functional (i.e. it picks up all the existing e-mail accounts, downloads new mail, etc...). The problem starts when we get to the local folders.

All of these have a date and time appended to them in the destination installation. For example, if the original folder is "Prosperity Bank" the destination folder is labeled "Prosperity Bank (2025_09_21 23_06_33 UTC)" and will not let not populate (shows no messages inside).

As I am typing this, it seems I may have identified the problem (or at least part of it). It seems the destination system install is slowly working its way through the local folders randomly (not in alphabetically order), as it seems to be slowly populating them with the old mail stored therein on the original system. It is going very slowly. Very slowly.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is it normal? Is there any way to quickly eliminate the dates now appended to the local file names? (Visually this is very annoying and I do not want to try modifying the individual folder names yet until I'm sure its populated as much as it will populate.)

Thank you for any assistance.

Larry Reese

I downloaded Thunderbird and added my email account. The email account I configured in Thunderbird is set to be permanently deleted. All information in the email account will be deleted. My question is whether I can use Thunderbird as an email archive? I think I copied all of the emails in the account into Thunderbird. When my email account is deleted will the copied emails in Thunderbird still be there or will they disappear as well?

Hi. I recently had to change email providers and at first chose Proton but had to change again for reasons. Before I moved to proton, I shifted a whack of email to local folders on the advice of someone. I backed up my profile folder before making the move to proton, but didn't realise (I know, 'duh') that local folders didn't move. It wasn't untill I moved again that the local folders in the new install were empty.

All 3 accounts—original, proton & new—had the same email account name/domain but I want to know how I could create another instance of it to port all my old email from the original service—which has all the email still in their original folders (not local) so I have them 'non-local' again and can go through and organize them anew.

The alternative is to connect the local folders to this new instance but I'd rather the first scenario.

I'll only still have access to all 3 providers for another couple of weeks so this is feeling urgent.

Any help/suggestions most welcome. Thanks!

I'm presently running TB 147.1esr on a Windows 11 system. I have archived mail by years (2020, 2021, etc.) on an IMAP server and I have defined a Local Folders entry. I want to move some archived years off the server onto the local folders. What is the best way to do this? I searched for documentation, but couldn't find an article on that subject.

I need to import my mail messages, exported from Mac OSX Mail, into Thunderbird on Windows 11. I have 2 versions of the Mail exports: i) i backed up the Mail folder from the System folder These are [ .emlx ] files in [ .mbox ] folders ii) I exported direct from the Mail app These are [ .mbox ] folders

Thanks for any advice I can get, Steve

How can I transfer total messages including date and addresses to a word document for layout and summarising. I used to do this perfectly well in Windows Live Mail for many years!!!!

I followed the recommended procedure to transfer the TB profile from an older W10 computer to a new W11 computer (both using POP accounts ), via a USB Flash Drive. The folders are all listed on the USB profile copy and observed during the scrolling detailed view while being copied to the new computer. Nevertheless, they are NOT listed in Local Folders on the new profile. Instead, ALL the messages (approx 700 of them!) are presented as UNREAD in the inbox folder. How can I restore the original folder sorting?

‘I have a series of mails 19 plus attachments that I wish to send to my bank i need to copy them and convert to PDF format. I can find no way to copy them out of my inbox’ for ‘Thunderbird’

Bonjour, je pratique THUNDERBIRD depuis de très nombreuses années et j'en suis très satisfait. D'ailleurs j'ai contribué à des donations au cours de l'année précédente. Je viens de constater tout récemment plusieurs choses qui me gênent : 1) je ne vois plus apparaître la commande "insérer" pour insérer une image dans un texte 2) quand j'enregistre un message pour le sauvegarder je ne vois que le texte du message, mais plus les entêtes (adresses e-mail, date, etc.). Pouvez-vous me donner des explications s'il vous plaît ? Merci par avance. Guy ROBIN guyrobinggl@gmail.com

Hello, I have been using THUNDERBIRD for many years and I am very satisfied with it. In fact, I contributed to donations during the previous year. I have just recently noticed several things that bother me: 1) I no longer see the "insert" command appear to insert an image into a text 2) when I save a message to save it I only see the text of the message, but no longer the headers (e-mail addresses, date, etc.). Can you give me an explanation please? Thank you in advance. Guy ROBIN guyrobinggl@gmail.com

Hi, Forums - I am a new Thunderbird user based on on-line research suggesting Thunderbird as the best way to relieve gmail account with local mailbox archiving. My gmail is out of storage by end of the month and my plan was to move a bunch of old messages into local Thunderbird mailbox to clear room in the google account. I have set up Thunderbird successfully with gmail using IMAP connectivity option. Thunderbird shows same folder structure as labels in gmail and displays all messages from the oldest to newest. So then I tried the "archiving" by setting up a folder structure under Thunderbird's Local Folders. Specifically, to start with I I set up Inbox_archive and Sent_archive and used right click Move To > Local Folders > Folder name to move old messages from live ...@gmail.com tree to Local Folder tree. Since there is also an option Copy To, my understanding was that Move should be different from Copy by also removing messages from gmail and move them to Local folders. At a first glance these steps seemed to work. I see unique old messages in Thuderbird Local Folders. I don't see these messages in Thunderbird's gmail inbox/sent and I also don't see these messages when I search in on-line gmail in:inbox and in:sent. I noticed, however, that google storage size didn't budge. I moved a thousand of more messages in the same way (thinking maybe older messages were just small) and the storage still didn't decrease. I then looked around in on-line gmail and found the messages that I presumed "archived" still sitting in gmail's All Mail. This explains why the storage size didn't change. I searched on the forum and on-line and can't get a confident answer on what am I missing to actually remove the messages from gmail - ideally in the most straightforward manner in one action as a cut and paste from on-line to local folders. Are there any IMAP/account settings that I should have so that Thunderbird's "Move to" actually removes messages from on-line account? Or is there a different archiving command/strategy I need to use?

I am hesitant to do any more trial and error on my own since I already messed up my gmail by having now thousands of messages still sitting in All Mail without proper Inbox and Sent tags and, thus, would appreciate the recommendation from someone who is familiar with my use case.

Thank you.