
Overwrote Thunderbird profile with Firefox
Hello! When making changes in Firefox, I recreated my profile in the profile manager and pointed it to the folder containing the profile, or so I thought. It just gave me a new profile and I didn’t have time to go digging to find out what was wrong. I realised later when trying to open Thunderbird that it was the wrong folder, I pointed Firefox to my Thunderbird profile, and now I can’t use it. I’ve been setting up a Raspberry Pi as a NAS/multimedia/backup server and so have been reconfiguring everything, and so of course my Thunderbird backup is not up to date. And I use POP as most of my mail accounts are quite old and have very limited storage. So there’s nothing much on the servers. The error message is "A newer version of Thunderbird may have made changes to your profile", and gives me no option to try loading my profile anyway. And I can’t try importing from the old profile into a new one.
I was using Thunderbird 91, as I depend on several addons for work stuff, and every time I update half of them stop working. I tried updating to the latest version (after making a copy of the broken profile) but still have the same problem. So my question is: how can I save my e-mails from my old profile? I understand that Firefox overwrote some of the files in the profile breaking it, but surely the mailboxes themselves must still be good?
Much thanks for any help!
All Replies (2)
Thank you! I had found that page, but I missed the note at the end of that section that tells you how to force it to start anyway. That solved my problem.
And good news, this time around all my addons appear to be working so far. I usually take the time once every year or two to go through the list of addons and try and find replacements for any that don’t support the new version before I actually update Thunderbird. This time I’d already updated while troubleshooting, so it’s a relief to see everything working. (and wow, according to my sent mail useragent, I’ve been using Thunderbird for nearly 19 years, since version 1.0)