Thunderbird Community Forum

I cannot get thunderbird to run on my computer (it runs fine on my wife's computer). I keep getting the profile can't be loaded error. I have tried the fixes recommend here but none worked.

Hello,

In my Thunderbird Profiles folder, I can drill down to ImapMail. I see multiple subfolders prefixed with my imap server name. eg:

- imap.server-5.com 10.85GB - imap.server-3.com 8.83 GB

and so on. The datestamp on each is different.

Within the two examples above is a large Inbox folder taking up ~8.8GB.

The size doesn't concern me as much as the fact of having two of these. I'd like to understand what Thunderbird is doing under the hood here. Does it create new imap.server-#.com folders periodically as backup/recovery folders?

I'd like to recover space where possible but if these are protective measures, I could live with that. However, if it creates future folders and replicates 8+GB of data multiple times, I'd like to know what steps I can take to free up disk space.

Thanks,

Thunderbird installed a new version and would not open until I created a new profile. Now all my locally saved email is missing. The only profile I can find is the new one for my email account, dated April 2026. Where is the old profile with all my saved emails? I have no email older than April 2026 in my Inbox. POP3 email, saved to my desktop computer, is gone. Please help me find them.

Hi, I am hoping that the community can help me find an answer to this. I have two computers that I use for work. The one in the office has TB running all the time and before I leave for the weekend/vacation I would close TB, copy the profile folder to a USB (or copy it to cloud) and then paste the profile folder on my work laptop (at home). While all the settings get copied (local folders structure, addons etc.) as I use IMAP, it downloads all the mail on the new system regardless. I thought that it should have the latest mail downloaded as part of the profile folder, is that not the case? The bigger issue is that none of the Completed Tasks Lists, Templates, etc. get updated. It still shows all the older stuff on the work laptop and no updates carry over from the PC (at work). Going through the profile folder I see multiple copies of the files prefs.js, folderCache.json, global-messages-db.sqlite appended as: prefs-computername.js and folderCache-computername.json etc. (The computername is the name of the PC - office/laptop) The profile name is the same between the two computers. TB is only started after the profile is copied locally. TB version is the same between systems. I am left scratching my head why somethings are copied but not others. Hoping that the community can help me here. Thanks!