why would you be creating profiles per email. That sounds like a very hard way to organise mail in Thunderbird.

I suggest you use the profile manager to delete the profile and start again. Note that the folder name extension and the profile name are not linked.

The profile.ini file contains a list of all the registered profile names and which folders they point to. Thunderbird will tend to name a profile and the folder extension the same thing, but the two things are not linked.

Thanks for your time, Matt!

Matt said

why would you be creating profiles per email. That sounds like a very hard way to organise mail in Thunderbird.

I understood that if two email addresses were syncd, then they belonged to the same user or two users who had access to the same passwords, whereas, if you had two profiles, then the email addresses would be set up for two different users.

I set up different emails for different types of correspondence. Having them appear in a single, I suppose you can call it profile or registry or organizer, is beyond confusing. When I want to do one type of correspondence, I want to log into a separate environment where I know I am only working on that one thing. When I close it, it's out of sight. I am horrified by synced emails.

I suggest you use the profile manager to delete the profile and start again.

The profile is currently attached to at least one email address. Before I delete the profile through the profile manager, do I need to go into the email and remove the access from within the email? Or will my deleting the profile simply shut off the access from within the email account information? I don't know if the email is looking for the profile (which has been deleted) or if the profile is looking for the email address. I know at some point they are talking to each other and one of the two programs (Thunderbird or Email) initiates this conversation.

Note that the folder name extension and the profile name are not linked.

I'm having to think about this. From this, I understand that, for example the extension .default, is not an actual extension but rather a part of a folder name, a part added for the user's convenience in identifying what email that particular profile is attached to.

The reason I changed in the middle of creating the profile is that when I was working on the profile, at one point, the profile went off to validate the email password with the email program and never came back. It just kept scrolling forever, so I had too much time to think and changed my mind about starting with that email address, so I went back to change it to a different account. After I completed the change, the profile said it was already attached to an account, which was confusing, because it never confirmed the validation of that email's password.

The profile.ini file contains a list of all the registered profile names and which folders they point to. Thunderbird will tend to name a profile and the folder extension the same thing, but the two things are not linked.

I became worried here because when I created a user name in Windows and decided to change the user name using the human interface provided for this purpose, I only discovered by accident that the original user name I created is still the one used by the Windows' registry. I am not changing the user name at all, I am simply assigning a nickname, if you will.

So, if I use the profile manager to delete the profile, which has not been used by me yet (although it must have connected, for its validation to have taken place, with at least one email address and possibly two), then is it safe to assume that the profile has also been deleted from the Windows registry and from the profile.ini file, which is located somewhere under Thunderbird in Windows Explorer?

I regret developments in much of today's software, which have left me with the feeling that I am working blind and trying to understand how something works by the mistakes I make.