థండర్బర్డ్ Community Forum

My "old" laptop (Windows 10) failed & refused to turn on ever again and it's been replaced by a new laptop (Windows 11). Long existing Email served by Mozilla Thunderbird has been loaded into new laptop but all that was loaded was about 6 current unread Emails in the Inbox and NOTHING in either Address Books (should be 30 or so in each) and NO FOLDERS (should be about 15 - 20). I own & run a business so all of this data/info is crucial but because the data currently lies within a laptop that died it appears it can't be retrieved by "normal" procedures. I need help here - lots of it.

Cheers and thank you. Pam E Victoria Australia

A satisfied user of TB on Linux for many years, about 3 months ago I lost many recent messages when transferring from an ancient laptop running Ubuntu to a new laptop running Fedora 42.

I installed my entire file system, including the .thunderbird directory in the home folder, on the new machine from a Duplicity backup of the old machine (BTW, I've now switched to Restic). All my files seemed to be just fine, except that when I opened TB, most messages in local folders that had been received earlier in 2025 were missing.

Hoping the problem was a defective backup, I made a new backup of .thunderbird on the old machine and copied it to the new machine. Nothing changed.

Thinking that Duplicity might be failing to backup TB files correctly, I then decided to copy .thunderbird itself (i.e., the directory and subdirectory structure and all files therein themselves) directly to a USB stick and attempt to restore from that. Unfortunately, the old machine then failed to boot up. Since then I've been making with a big gap in recent email history.

With a bit of spare time over the holidays, I've finally managed to boot up the old machine. TB running there shows the messages missing from the new machine. I have copied .thunderbird to a stick, as I had wanted in September. The problem now is that I cannot simply copy my old TB profile to the new machine, because I'll lose the last 3 months of locally stored email traffic.

So, how do I get the lost messages onto my new machine without losing recent messages or creating loads of duplicates?

Hi, I have followed the instructions for incoming and outgoing servers to convert my Juno Webmail to AN MBOX FORMAT and bring it over to Thunderbird. However, it is not syncing up to Thunderbird and bringing in all of my old emails from Juno.

Any help you can offer with this situation would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

Carla

Hello - I'm trying to transition from Outlook desktop to Thunderbird in Widows 11, but the setup fails (just stops) when I try to import my Outlook pst data. Ive tried the Outlook scan and repair tool - no luck. My file is quite large - about 20GB. Is that the issue? Is there a workaround?

Thanks for any suggestions.