Thunderbird コミュニティフォーラム

I have followed the instructions to txfer the profile to new PC W.11 - from W.10. T'bird says: "Your Thunderbird profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible."

I have the old folder from 'roaming' pasted in correctly - did it twice. No change.

I also have all my message folder ready on the new PC. These are held in a better location for bak up. When I moved to the last machine - nine years ago - I had exactly the same problem!

As new install will not load the profile I cannot get into it to tell it anything.

Suggestions welcome. SCA

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

I use Thunderbird on multiple computers, sharing an NAS. One is Windows 10, one is Linux Mint. Both have Thunderbird 153.3.1esr installed. The email Profile and email file storage is on the NAS. The "home" folders on both machines have a profile.ini file that points to that shared profile. This worked fine for many years.

For perhaps 6 months i've only accessed email from Windows. Now i'm trying again to access from LinuxMint. It no longer works.

From Linux, at startup, Thunderbird complains that i'm trying to open my profile from "an older version of Thunderbird". A popup dialog claims "A newer version of Thunderbird may have made changes to your profile which are no longer compatible with this older version. " It offers to create a new profile.

First, the same version last edited the profile as is reading it. Second, i don't want to create a new profile, as the existing one has multiple email accounts at multiple domains, with multiple sigatures, and custom storage paths, etc. I tried profile manager, but it just takes me back to this dialog.

How do i get Thunderbird to use my existing shared email storage ?

Never could Install TBird 152 ... Found Out that Profile Bugs started with Tbird 138... Loaded Tbird 135 To Avoid Profile Bugs... Now I am getting a Strange Error Message ... Now I am getting a strange Nuisance Prompt Says I need to Create New Profile .

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 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!

I have moved my Thunderbird data from drive C:\xxx\Thunderbird to N:\xxx\Thunderbird. The Thunderbird program remains on "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird" How do I tell Thunderbird to find its data on the N: drive?

     Thank you,    Art Lieberman

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.

bonjour, J'ai installé un nouveau profil, mais j'arrive pas a utiliser l'icone -sélectionner messages à droite au dessus des mails- appliquer ces paramètres/la vue... Ca me serai utile pour simplifier et unifier mes affichages. Actuellement j'observe aucune changement, bug ou erreur de manip.

Helping a friend with her HP-i3 PC running Windows 11 that I setup in March of 2025. It was a new PC purchased from BestBuy in March 2025.

I had to restore the image backup of her C drive that I did in March 2025 because of a Windows problem that I wasn't able to resolve. Now that problem is resolved but Tbird has the old profile folder without her new email contacts. (Unfortunately, I did not remember to use Tbird to save a backup of her profile folder before doing the restore.)

She has a recent image backup so I can extract Tbird's profile folder from that backup. What would be the correct procedure to replace the current profile folder with the one extracted from the recent backup?

(don't currently have access to her PC so don't know the version number of Tbird currently installed)

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)

I installed Thunderbird on my new laptop, then imported the profile from my old laptop

The main screen has, under "Inbox", folders for Drafts, Sent, Trash, Archive and Spam, which are being used by the program

Folders for Drafts, Sent and Trash also appear under "Local Folders" (along with Outbox) and these aren't being used by the program.

How do I get rid of these duplicate folders? "Spam" had a delete option, so that was easy, but the others don't.

I tried the two suggestions for a previous "Duplicates" question but they didn't resolve things.

Thank you

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!