How do I restore emails to Mozilla Thunderbird from a "mail" file?
Thunderbird suddenly gave an error that the profile was missing or inaccessible. I moved the profile to a secure location and then went through the account wizard to re-setup the account, as that was all Tbird would allow me to do. When I tried to restore the profile but found it was gone from the secure location and all I see there is two files; "email" and "email.xxx". The email file is 4GB so I know it has to be the information I'm looking for but I can't figure out how to restore the email file to Tbird. I don't see files of those names anywhere in any Mozilla Thunderbird folders.
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so if you have the profile, why was it reported as missing?
Have you looked here http://kb.mozillazine.org/Recovering_a_profile_that_suddenly_disappeared
Matt, thank you for replying. I'll quote from the article you pointed out (and, yes I did find and read it);
"Thunderbird has a nasty habit of once in a great while forgetting about the existence of a profile if it uses the default name."
So, to answer your question; That's why.
It also says a quick way to tell which problem I'm having is to look at my personal address book. If it looks OK go to "corrupt or empty prefs.js". It (my address book) is in fact GONE. So I followed the other instructions; "Lost Profile".
"Follow the instructions on how to move a profile", which I did as I explained in my question. It says it would once again tell Thunderbird where the profile was. It did not. It said to "Use the profile manager to change the name of 'my' profile to a unique name to prevent this from occurring again. It did not find a profile and would only let me go to the account wizard and setup my email account.
Next thing I know the profile is gone and replaced by the two aforementioned files; Mail and mail.(xxx).
So, we're back at step one. Is there a way to restore these mails from a mail file?
Select Help/Troubleshooting Information, click 'Open Folder' under Profile Folder, exit TB, open the Mail/Local Folders subfolder of the profile, copy the "email" file (the 4GB one) into Local Folders, restart TB and find the "email" folder under Local Folders on the left side under your account folders.