Thunderbird: missing subfolders and new ones with hexadecimal names
Description of situation: I had to reinstall Windows. My ThunderBird profile folder with emails is on different physical drive (so was not touched during the reinstall procedure). After system reinstall I reinstalled Thunderbird as well and changed profiles.ini to point to the old folder with emails. At first everything seemed to work but then I observed that some folders in TB are empty (and they were not before) and there are many new ones with strange names consisting only of hexadecimal digits (like fb43e4d2). Probably all these hexadecimal folders are empty in TB (I checked few of them). I checked also the folder structure on my disc: the new folders do exist in the file structure as also the subfolders (with contents) of those folders which in TB appear as empty. It might be so, but I am not sure, that the number of the new hexadecimal empty folders is the same as the number of the missing in TB (but present on disc and still with contents) folders.
I tried closing TB, deleting msf files and starting TB again. No progress. I also tried to use Right-Mouse-Button>Properties>Repair folder method but to no avail.
Question: What can I do see these subfolders - which physically still exist on the disc - in TB again?
Configuration: Windows 10 Pro/64, TB 68.1.1 (32 bit), I have huge amounts of emails (over 50GB), and yes I really need them, so deleting them is not a solution for me. I also have a backup from one week back, so I can restore some folders if needed (in fact I tried restoring the entire profile, but it did not help).
Any help will be appreciated, I use my emails and TB heavily on every day basis.
PS: I also noticed that when I examine in TB properties of the now empty folders their location points to the new physical folder with hexadecimal name. If i only could change the location attribute of a TB folder (it seems to be read only field in Folder Properties window) I could manually restore at least some of the lost folders.
Is there a way to change the location (just the file name, not the rest of the path) of an TB folder? Where TB stores this information?
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Gekozen oplossing
It seems that I have solved the problem for myself, but it is definitely not a general solution - TB should fix it's Unicode folder names, otherwise lots of people will be in trouble again and again like me.
My solution: I turned off TB, went to Control Panel>Clock and Region>Region>Administrative>Change system locale ... and changed 'Current language for non-Unicode programs' to 'Polish' and selected (do not think it is also necessary) 'Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support'. After starting TB again it recognized again those TB folders with polish characters in names (at least those I did manage to check by know) and showed their contents (wow!). Additional empty TB folders and corresponding physical folders on disc with hexadecimal names still remain, so I have to delete them manually, but the important point is that I can access all my mail again!
Maybe this solution will help somebody else.
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I still do not have a solution, but I found a culprit - its a problem with character encoding. I observed that hexadecimal names are created by TB for physical folders which corresponds to TB folders which have in their names characters with Unicode codes above 255, i.e. not fitting into one byte (for example all Polish characters but ó fall into that category).
It seems that TB before my Windows reinstallation was able to deal with that characters but after system reinstallation - maybe due to some change in system settings - couldn't and tried to replace physical folders having special characters in names with folders having hexadecimal names. But TB succeeded only partially - it created new physical folders (those with hexadecimal names) on my disk, but was not able to copy contents from the original ones.
The question now is: can TB be told to again to treat characters with codes above 255 as normal characters and - as a result - display corresponding TB folders again with their contents? (Maybe it requires a change in Windows settings and not in TB's?)
Again, any help would be appreciated!
Gekozen oplossing
It seems that I have solved the problem for myself, but it is definitely not a general solution - TB should fix it's Unicode folder names, otherwise lots of people will be in trouble again and again like me.
My solution: I turned off TB, went to Control Panel>Clock and Region>Region>Administrative>Change system locale ... and changed 'Current language for non-Unicode programs' to 'Polish' and selected (do not think it is also necessary) 'Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support'. After starting TB again it recognized again those TB folders with polish characters in names (at least those I did manage to check by know) and showed their contents (wow!). Additional empty TB folders and corresponding physical folders on disc with hexadecimal names still remain, so I have to delete them manually, but the important point is that I can access all my mail again!
Maybe this solution will help somebody else.