Thunderbird local folders disappeared
After years of using Thunderbird (PC) as a POP email client without issues, one day my client discovered the body text of his emails wouldn't display: not in the preview pane, nor when the email was opened into a separate tab. I tried the recommendations I found online (repair the folders, rebuild them by deleting the associated .msf files, relaunch in Troubleshoot Mode) but none fixed the problem. I decided to create a new Thunderbird profile to see if the problem persisted—but the password I had for the account didn't work, so I wasn't able to finish the test. I reassigned the original profile as the default, exited Thunderbird and relaunched it. But when it came back up in the original profile, none of my client's custom folders, containing years worth of carefully organized emails, appeared. Only the Inbox, Trash, etc., with the same problem of not displaying the body text.
So my first objective is to get my client's custom folders to display as they had before I created the second profile; my next objective is to try to get the body text to display in his messages. Any suggestions welcome! The profile folder is located on a file server, and is fully accessible by the PC, with full permissions. Thanks!
All Replies (4)
The update to 128.10.2 or 138.0.2 has a fix for such folders appearing blank.
"Messages could not be viewed if the profile used a UNC path"
Thanks for the reply, sfhowes! The user is already on 128.10.2esr. I'm wondering if the profiles.ini on his computer needs to be modified?
Try creating a new profile and copying local mail from the old profile to the new: Help/Troubleshooting Info, about:profiles. For IMAP accounts, it might be necessary to re-subscribe custom folders. Using Profile Manager in this way is less prone to errors than editing profiles.ini.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1966256
refers to profiles stored on network devices.
Thanks so much again for the quick reply, sfhowes! I did try creating a new profile, but got stuck because I didn't have the password for the account and the user wasn't available to coordinate a reset. After I deleted the new profile, the local folders in the original profile disappeared in T'bird, and now when I look in the profile folder on the server, the MBOX files have vanished and Inbox shows 0KB. Strange and disconcerting. I'm now trying to restore last Friday's backup of the profile folder (the setup was POP, don't leave emails on server, so the data is only local + backups).
Thanks for the link to the very informative discussion of the related bug. Strange again though, if I read it right, 128.10.2esr is supposed to be the bug-fix version, but it didn't solve the problem for my user.
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