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?

I am a bit of a noob, and probably out of my depth, so please bear with me. It also is a bit of a confusing situation so I hope that I can explain it clearly.

A while ago, Thunderbird stopped working. Whenever I tried starting it up, I got an error message saying that Thunderbird wasn't responding. I thought there might be a problem with some update so I decided that I would reinstall the program. As I went to back up my profile, I found out that there were actually two profile folders where in the past I would only find one. I chose to back up both, and procede with de- and re-installing Thunderbird. After doing so I tried to integrate the old profiles back into the new installation. At first, I chose the largest of the to profile maps and copied it where I found it before the re-installation. I created a new profile using the old profile folder through the User Profile menu. This seemed to work! However, I noticed something. I have two e-mail accounts running in this profile. One IMAP and one POP. I noticed that the POP account was missing about a years worth of old e-mails. As if it stopped saving them at some point. I figured they must be in the other profile folder I found before the re-installation. I tried creating a new profile with this profile but when starting up Thunderbird afterwards I once again got the 'Thunderbird isn't responding' message. So I reverted back to the first profile I made, the one with the missing e-mails. Appart from those e-mails, it seemed to be working well. To get back what was missing, I tried copying the files in the "inbox.sbd" of the back up that wasn't responding into the back up that was responding, thinking that if it messed something up, I could just CTRL + Z my way out of trouble. It seemed that there were three locations in the functioning back up that I could copy the files into, each having the server name of the e-mail account that I was missing e-mails from. I tried copying the files in each of them, each time removing the files through 'undo' before trying the next location. As this seemed unsuccesfull I tried restarting Thunderbird again (having removed the copied files from all locations) which resulted in the following error message:

In a pink screen that I have never seen before. After this I tried removing all profiles and starting again with a fresh copy of the backed up profile folder as I figured I might have accidentally changed something in the profile folder I was using. This however keeps giving the same error message.

Clearly, I messed something up. But I don't know what. Can anybody help? One last thing I noticed that in the 'Mail' folder within the profile folder, there where three folders with the server name before, now there is only one. I guess this is a clue?

All help is welcome!

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?