Thunderbird Community Forum

I recently bought Windows 11 a Friend loaded 11 and Thunderbird for me! Not all of Thunderbird transfered, I'm missing 8 t0 10 separate folders and all of my Email address! Can you help me! Thanks Danny Dimperio

Recently my HP PC crashed, and since had its old hard drive updated to a new solid state drive. Basically I am lead to believe is was a problem caused by a security update from Microsoft. My old system was Windows 10, now updated to 11. A copy was taken of the old drive and I was advised that all of the apps etc could be accessed from a folder on my desk top. Not really the case at all. In the mean time I have manually added back all the apps etc that I would have been using. OK, my question is, I have downloaded the email account and set it up OK. Is there any way all of my old stored emails and folders can be restored and copied to my new OS. If not, I can survive. Probabley a good idea to loose some of the old data. Thanks in advance

the thunderbird on the old laptop still showes all emails back until 2022. after copying the profil to the new laptop as described on the mozilla video, thunderbird took all settings but at one of the email accounts it just showes emails back to may 2026. The rest has disappeared. I tried all fixing experiences I found on internet but it doesn´t work. This special Email account had the pop3 - setting.

Hello everyone,

I am hoping someone can help me recover some EXTREMELY important emails for a legal matter. I was trying to export an entire nested Gmail label (WORK/TNC/TNC DISPUTE) to PDF.

It's a lot of emails spanning from April 2024 that I had painstakingly been going through and labeling to get them ready to print to use as evidence for a work dispute. When faced with the task of having to print all those emails to pdf, one by one, I wanted to chew my own arm off!

I'm convinced there must be another way to bulk print to pdf......and so I went down a few rabbit holes in search of my quick fix.....(I'm not trying to be lazy, I just have very little time left to get this done, and right now I'm losing the will to live if my reality is that I will be busy with this till the end of time.)

I read different threads and questions over the internet and found information that led me to Thunderbird. (Hi, Thunderbird :). I know there are paid apps or extensions that can bulk print to pdf, but I unfortunately don't have the money to pay for them (i.e. the work dispute - salary has been frozen for over 2 years and resignation was denied, so no income and held hostage by my employer - the emails I have lost are literally my future!). Sorry, enough of the why.....

I DID THIS:

So I read that I need to to create a folder in Thunderbird's "Local Folders" with the same name, and simply drag and drop the label from the original label to the local folder label (I did all of this in Thunderbird.

Unfortunately, this went VERY wrong. At first it seemed like it was doing something, but it didn't really do anything that I am aware of.....There was nothing in the local folder I had created and dragged the label to, there was nothing in the original label folder (everything was empty). I died! Then comforted myself with the fact that it's still in GMAIL.....that was the naive, optimistic me talking..... Headed over to Gmail, saw my label name, sigh of relief, clicked on the label name.....DIED 10000000000000 x over.......I continued to cry for the next 4 hours...

.That was the 12th of June.....I'm still trying to get them back.....I have been able to find a few bits of info here and there.....I just don't know how to get them back into Gmail for me to never try be so foolish again!!! (Until someone maybe shows me how to bulk print to PDF?????)....

Here is the current situation and the technical details of what I've found so far:

What happened:

Thunderbird executed a "Move" command instead of a "Copy".

The TNC DISPUTE label is in my Gmail web interface (the emails are not in the label, nor the the Trash and none of my settings anywhere are set to delete permanently etc., on exit).

The Local Folder in Thunderbird shows up on my screen, but it is completely empty.

What I have discovered in the background:

Account Type: IMAP connected to Gmail (*********@gmail.com). (i've replaced my email address name with stars to not put my private email on a public site)

The Local Files: I found the tracking path imap://**********%40gmail.com@imap.gmail.com/WORK/TNC/TNC DISPUTE. I also found the raw file directories containing TNC DISPUTE (no extension) and the TNC DISPUTE.msf index file.

The roadblock I am hitting:

I read that deleting the corrupted .msf index file while Thunderbird is closed will force it to rebuild the index and potentially reveal the emails. However, at first I couldn't safely get into the folder to do this:

When I clicked "Open Folder" from Help > More Troubleshooting Information, Windows threw an error: "Explorer.EXE - There was a problem sending the command to the program."

When I try to bypassed Thunderbird and use the Windows Run dialog with %appdata%\Thunderbird\Profiles, Windows threw another path error and refused to open it.

I ended up reinstalling Thunderbird and it fixed the access profile issue and I can now access where the data gets saved from Thunderbird.....

I just don't know what to do from here to get my (previously local foldered misshaped moved) folder back in my Gmail. (safely - to not corrupt everything or worse....delete it permanently.....)

The details of the missing emails (contents of the label that did copy to the local drive I think):

Directory Contents (as shown in the attached image)

1. TNC DISPUTE.sbd

• Type: File folder

• Date modified: 19 Jun 2026, 00:55

2. msgFilterRules.dat

• Type: DAT file

• Date modified: 12 Jun 2026, 05:49

• Size: 0 KB

3. TNC DISPUTE

• Type: File

• Date modified: 19 Jun 2026, 05:55

• Size: 670,605 KB

4. TNC DISPUTE.msf

• Type: MSF file

• Date modified: 12 Jun 2026, 22:31

• Size: 3 KB

5. Trash

• Type: File

• Date modified: 12 Jun 2026, 05:48

• Size: 0 KB

6. Trash.msf

• Type: MSF file

• Date modified: 12 Jun 2026, 06:27

• Size: 2 KB

7. Unsent Messages

• Type: File

• Date modified: 12 Jun 2026, 05:48

• Size: 0 KB

8. Unsent Messages.msf

• Type: MSF file

• Date modified: 12 Jun 2026, 06:24

• Size: 2 KB

Sorry for the long post, hopefully someone can help me go back in time and have my only issue be searching for ways to bulk print to pdf and not having to try restore the only emails that are actually worth being on there.

TIA xxx Margz

I have several MBOX files with me and I want to import MBOX files into the Thunderbird email client. I've come across different methods, including manual techniques and third-party tools, but I'm unsure which approach is the most efficient, especially when dealing with multiple or large-sized MBOX files. Some methods also seem complicated for users who are not very technical.

Suggest me any reliable tool for this!

I need to use the offline MBOX folders of several email accounts that I access via IMAP to migrate the contents to a new provider. There are no files in my Thunderbird profile directory tree with the extension .MBOX (under Windows 11) but I have some fairly large files of the form: <Thunderbird profile>\ImapMail\<IMAP server>\INBOX and <Thunderbird profile>\ImapMail\<IMAP server>\Sent are these the MBOX files? Can I safely ignore the .msf files? A further problem is that I have more than one account on the same server, but the second account only appears as: <Thunderbird profile>\ImapMail\<IMAP server>-1\INBOX and <Thunderbird profile>\ImapMail\<IMAP server>-1\Sent How can I identify the corresponding e-mail accounts?

I am using Thunderbird as email client on Win 10. When trying to backup old messages I am getting en error message as below. I tried several ways exporting emails as “eml”, PDF’s or even plain text, but all the same. Following error message:

[Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [nsIPrefBranch.getCharPref]" nsresult: "0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://mboximport/content/mboximport/utils.js :: getSubjectForHdr :: line 186" data: no]

Exporting: Folder: Inbox Msg: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender

getSubjectForHdr@chrome://mboximport/content/mboximport/utils.js:186:26 onAfterStopRequest@chrome://mboximport/content/mboximport/exportTools.js:1809:14 onStopRequest@chrome://mboximport/content/mboximport/exportTools.js:1743:28

Can anyone assist?

I bought Thunderbird because Gmail kept telling me I reached my 15gb limit. I thought I could transfer my emails to my local hard drive thereby freeing up my Gmail account. Now Thunderbird is saying I have reached my limit as well. Is there a limit on transferring emails to your hard drive? What am I doing wrong?

I have thunderbird and fastmail is the donor email app I am trying to delete all or most of this email in fastmail using thunderbird and saving or archiving this mail to a separate volume I am using a M4 mac mini.

I just had a support session and the tech was unable to solve the problem. We tried installing a new version of Thunderbird and importing the messages over from the default install and it just freezes up. He tried replacing account settings with the account settings from a previous version and that didn't work either. He suggested contacting Mozilla to see if there was a way to import messages from the frozen default to my new profile.

I recently migrated all my LSU.edu emails over to Thunderbird. Of the nearly 30,000 messages that moved over into the Thunderbird Inbox, only 7179 are accessible (blue button), while the remaining 28,012 are listed in a greyed out button.

Please help me access these 28,000 messages.

Thank you

Brett

Hi, I recently transferred my Thunderbird email to a new Mac. Everything showed up including new emails. But none of my important subfoldersfolders under the inbox showed up. I have all folders on my old computer. Can you guide me on how to recover them or export them to new device? Thank you!

Why the program will not read old zip that thunderbird made,I have watch countless hours of crap on YouTube and still can not read my old zip files, I must be missing a step in process , also I am elderly, so explain it clear Thank you, most appreciated

I am moving my Thunderbird (32 bit) data from an old Win 7 computer to Linux Mint on a new machine with Thunderbird 64 bit. I have followed all the advice to copy the old computer profile to the profile folder in Mint, but nothing appears in Thunderbird. My pop3 email server has 2-factor authentication; I can set this up and access or send new emails, but I can't import all my old email folders. The old Thunderbird is version 115.18.0 (32 bit) and says it is "up to date on esr update channel" The Mint Thunderbird is 140.0.6 esr (64 bit) and was recently installed with Mint.

As these versions are 32 bit and 64 bit respectively, I don't see how I can make them the same version, as recommended for transferring profiles.

How can I make this work?

Old win 10 computer with Thunderbird pop account. Want to move all saved e-mails from old computer to new computer. New computer (win 11) installed thunderbird as an IMAP account. Alternatively, if not practical, how to save old e-mail in readable format. Thanks