Hi all, I've tried various solutions posted here to move my Thunderbird mail profile to a new hard drive/installation of Thunderbird, and nothing is working. I didn't have the foresight to copy the entire Thunderbird folder out before my HD had to be replaced,

Then you will not be able to recover everything would be my guess. If the folder was IMAP, quite possibly nothing.

and I just copied the individual mail folders inside the Profiles folder (which always worked in the past). Now, no matter where I past them inside the new installation (whether it's AppData > Roaming > Thunderbird > Profiles) or some variation thereof, I either get nothing upon launching TB, or I get empty folders where my emails used to be. I'm desperate to recapture these emails - I launched a new business last year and all the track record of new accounts/links are in those emails. Can anyone help me? There used to be an add-on posted here but it was later posted that that, also, is now defunct. I also have about 15 years of old Eudora emails from my existing business that I rely on for a "paper trail" that I can't afford to lose. If there is a repair utility I can buy, I'm willing to do that. I just need to know what to do here. Thanks for any help anyone can send my way. Gail

I will assume the "folders" were in the mail folder of your old profile and will therefore be local and recoverable.

Therefore, pointing the import export tools at the copies should allow them to be imported. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools-ng/?src=ss

I suggest using the import mbox file option (they should normally be stored as mbox files. by Thunderbird) Choosing the last option to include sub-directories and pointing the folder to use to the root of your backup will allow it to walk the folder tree under it and import what it finds. Note that you will have to have a folder in "local Folders" selected to start the import to. I suggest clicking the folder you want to import to them right clicking it to invoke the import export tools from the pop up menu.

This may generate timeout messages, simply select continue as large folders are prone to just taking to long to complete.

Hi Matt,

This add-on did help, so I thank you. But it created a colossal mess that took me almost a full day to clean up. It just imported and dumped pure chaos into my Local Folder, no rhyme or reason compared to my previously well-organized folders. Some folders were split into 2 or 3, so tons of duplication that I had to wade through. I had 10 or 12 Sent folders with emails from a decade ago...a real nightmare. But...I did retrieve my email, and that's what I wanted. It was an incentive for me to finally clean out years of stuff I really don't need to hang on to anymore. So there's that.

I will NEVER do this again. Lesson learned! Thanks again for your help. One thing that would help for those of us who've never used an add-on before: I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to actually launch the dang thing...finally guessed to right-click on a folder and the menu came up to launch the utility. THAT would have been nice to know, or have written down somewhere...:-)

Gail

I suggest clicking the folder you want to import to them right clicking it to invoke the import export tools from the pop up menu.

Another thing to be very careful of is allowing anti virus product to scan in the profile folders while Thunderbird is active. Likewise, streaming backups and cloud synchronization of the profile location is a no no.

These things have a nasty habit of causing duplicate mbox files to be created because they are not available when Thunderbird tries to write to them. It is not just the mail files, I have seen folk with more than 99 pref.js files. Clearly they are not having success saving changes.

Without being nasty. Eudora was particularly tolerant of corruption in mail stores. So there are some truly odd things imported from there.