Yonke imikhiqizo Community Forum

I just upgraded my desktop pc from Windows 10 to 11, and before the upgrade I used the Tools Export function to export my complete Thunderbird profile, so I could import it after the upgrade. Unfortunately the export file cannot be read on my upgraded pc using the Import function - Thunderbird gives me error messages every time, that suggest the exported folder might be corrupted or invalid.

My IMAP emails are fine, as I have set those accounts up from scratch and the folders have now populated with all the emails - the problem is all my filed emails, dating back many years, which were all stored manually in a filing system under Local Folders.

I tried manually copying across the individual files from the extracted back-up folder into my live Thunderbird profile and then reopened Thunderbird...which worked to some extent...as in, all the folders are there, but no emails are showing! It shows no messages under each folder, even though if you look under the Profile you can see that the email files exist.

I tried various ways to bring them in, including zipping one of the folders and trying to import from the zip file (which also brought in a folder but no emails) but even though the email files are clearly there under my profile, Thunderbird shows 0 messages in all my Local Folders. It's as though it is unaware the files exist, so I suspect it needs them to be formally imported somehow?

I would hate to lose the emails, as they document important information and purchases etc over many years, along with archived emails for my charity work, social events, etc. As I said, I can see the files are there but simply copying the files to my profile has only worked to the extent the filing 'structure' is visible, Thunderbird doesn't display any of the emails.

I have included two images...one of my Thunderbird Local Folders as they currently look, and the other showing the backed up files existing in my Profile, which I hope are helpful.

Can anyone help please? I am running a desktop PC on Windows 11. Thanks, David.

When I reinstalled Thunderbird, I got my account back, but the Local Folders were missing. I found where they're hiding on my computer, but I can't figure out how/where to copy and paste that folder so they show up in Thunderbird. Can someone walk me through those last steps, please?

Thanks

On the 20, of October I was forced to re install Windows 10. Kept my data but I had to re install all my apps. With Thunderbird I follow the same procedure I used with Firefox: After installation I copied the profile folder from my backup and replaced the new one. That worked out well. With Thunderbird, I followed the same procedure, all my emails where there but not my local folders. I am attaching several snapshots to illustrate my steps. Image 1 "local folders now" Image 2 "Profile Folder". (why there are 2 sub-folders)? Image 3 "Mail in the profile folder" Image 4 " List of folders in my Local Folders" The are there, how do I get them back on Thunderbird in the correct place "Local Folders"? Thank you for your help again. Regards Ilio Pieroni

I converted my old Outlook emails in to MBOX using the Syscurve conversion software, and then moved the MBOX file into my Local Folder for Thunderbird. When I open Thunderbird it sees the file, but does not see the folders or messages inside the file. The Local Folder has the following three files in it (plus the trash, etc.): output_20251127110416.mbox 4,194,310 kb output_20251127110416.mbox.msf 2 kb output_20251127110416.msf 2 kb Thunderbird shows the output_20251127110416.mbox in the Local Folder but says no messages found when I click on it. How do I get Thunderbird to see the mbox files?

This is second request (can't find the first). I need to import multiple (bookoo) .EML files into TB 115.10 to later move into "folders". Several weeks ago I somehow found someway to import a single .EML file (downloaded from an old ISP) into TB -- and then got busy with other projects -- and now cannot figure how I did it. I did not use an extension (ImportExportTools NG) -- just the native tools in TB 115.10. If anyone is familiar with importing EML files -- sure would appreciate suggestions. Thanks.

I have an email account with BlueHost, which also hosts my web domain. A couple weeks ago I stopped receiving emails and contacted BlueHost tech support. The agent had no clue why I wasn't receiving email. She said "Can you please click on acocunt actions and remove the account and re-addd it. [sic]" I did that, and I was again able to receive emails. But then all my old emails -- sent and received -- had disappeared. BlueHost was able to restore my Inbox emails back to May 19, but was not able to recover any Sent emails. I have a backup of my Thunderbird directory from April, but would like to recover all of my old emails, which apparently still exist because my current Thunderbird Profiles directory contains files corresponding to deleted email folders. For example, my Inbox had a subfolder -- call it ABC -- that was deleted and is no longer visible in my Inbox, but I can find files ABC (no extension) and ABC.msf in my Inbox.sbd folder. My Sent.sbd folder also contains files ABC and ABC.msf. These folders are in C:\Users\aaa\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\aaa.default\Mail\mail.aaa.com (with "aaa" representing my personal identifiers). mail.aaa.com contains files Inbox, Inbox.msf, Sent, and Sent.msf, which seem to contain my old emails. (Inbox is 132,151 KB and Sent is 289,829 KB, and the file dates are from a couple weeks ago, when I removed and re-added the email account.)

Is there a way that I can recover the old emails?

Had issues with Comcast emails. They were set up with POP settings. Was on the phone with Comcast and uninstalled 3 email addresses and reinstalled using IMAP settings. I did not delete the message data leaving that box unchecked. After about 1.5 hours on the phone with Comcast was able to get the reinstalled Comcast email addresses to pull all of the emails off Comcast website. But there are emails that are missing from each of the inbox and sent folders for each of the 3 Comcast email addresses.

I do an incremental weekly backup using Acronis True Image 2020 Home Edition. I see the folders in the path but since they were saved last Saturday under POP settings, the backups I will need to try to recover are in 3 of the Comcast folders in the "MAIL" folder and not "IMAPMAIL" folder which listed 6 folders from imap.comcast1.net through imapcomcast6.net.

What do I need to copy from the correct Comcast folder called "Profile" where the izpoojy7.default is? Within this izpoojy7.default is the folder mail.comcast-1.net which has 1 of the 3 Comcast email addresses I need to recover the inboxes and sent folder emails. Please see the attached photo of the contents of this mail.comcast-1.net folder.

Do I just copy the Inbox.mozmsgs as well as the Sent.mozmsgs files? Or do I also need to recover more of the files within the respective mail.comcast-1.net folder? Thank you for any assistance you can offer on this matter.

I am not sure if this is the correct place to ask my question. Apologies if you think it should be somewhere else in Thunderbird Help.

My old W10 machine crashed in September. I bought a W11 machine in October.

A colleague managed to rescue all my data from the W10 to a HDD.

I installed Thunderbird 143.0.1 to the W11 machine. On running the program it found me and my emails. I hoped it would find my wife's emails too. But no luck so far. Both domain names are the same. I've tried adding the details I have for my wife's email as a new account, but the program goes on and on looking with no result, and no end. I have to unplug the power cord to end it.

I've followed advice from the help pages to Find and restore my Profile without opening Thunderbird. In the process I've deleted the Profile on the W11 install, and substituted the Profile from the W10 install. It was around 8GB. So I assumed that Local Folders and my wife's details would show. Neither of these things occur. My account is shown together with recent emails.

What is happening? How can I get my wife's email account to show? How can I find my archive of emails in Local Folders? Any help gratefully accepted. Thunderbird 101 maybe?

I recently lost all my Stored messages (don't know what I did). I have tried restoring everything from my backup device with no success. My backup data is as follows:- Chris's email 3.2.25 (version 128.6.1est (64 bit) Thunderbird Profiles jb1w6eta-esr imapMail imap.virginmedia.com

My stored folders are there.

I have tried importing using Thunderbird Tools Import From a Thunderbird Installation Choose a Profile folder I have then entered various levels of above backup They all say complete without actually transferring any data.

The current level of Thunderbird I have installed is 128.7.1esr.. Since this is different from the backup could that have an effect or am I missing a step in the import procedure?

Thanks for any help

I have a large amount of email stored on an IMAP server. Would like to reduce that by moving most or all of it to a local disk drive. Am looking for a (hopefully simple) guide to doing the transfer. I don't see a Local Folders entry in the left-hand pane; not sure if that matters. (Presently running TB 115.10.1 64-bit on Windows 10 and 11.)

I have 6 email accounts in Thunderbird (TB). 4 recently created IMAP accounts and two POP accounts.

I recently added an IMAP email client for my domain name. There already exists a POP account for this domain name and I’ve had it since TB came out (I used Pegasus Mail before).

The account names are displayed the same in TB except the IMAP account. "___@___.com" The above is the POP account and it only displays the email name: "___@___com"

"___@___.com IMAP" The above IMAP account also displays the word “IMAP” in the title.

I have over 46000 messages in 58 sub folders on this POP account and I want to keep all of them for now.

My biggest question is - when I Delete the POP account, "will TB also delete all the sub folders at the same time ?"

Right now, the Inbox on the IMAP account does not retain any messages. When I start TB, we know it auto checks all email accounts and downloads new mail to each account. Emails to my domain name go to the IMAP account first. When I open the Inbox in the IMAP account, I can see all the downloaded messages but only for a second. They disappear from IMAP and transfer to the POP account.

Every 10 minutes after that, TB downloads messages from all accounts again. This time any messages to the IMAP account can be opened & viewed. They can also be deleted or moved to another folder. 3 to 5 minutes later, they ALL appear in the POP account. Any messages not deleted remain in the POP account Inbox. No messages remain in the Inbox for the IMAP account.

I know I need to move all the folders and sub folders from the POP account display to the IMAP account display. This is going to take a while. Like I said, the Inbox will not retain any mail, it automatically moves to the POP account after 3 to 5 minutes.

I have moved the ‘Sent’ mail folder to the IMAP account and started on some of my Archives files. The first one I moved from POP to IMAP was a ‘Sent 2008-2015' folder. This folder has 5363 messages. I just did a ‘drag and drop’ with my left mouse button from the POP Archive folder to the IMAP Archive folder. It worked like a charm. Took a couple of minutes and you could see TB counting off the messages being moved at the bottom of the screen.

Seem like TB was teasing me, it will no longer copy large count sub folders with ‘drag and drop’. I think that first folder is the largest. TB will sometimes create the proper folder name but not move any messages. I have to go in and select 100 or so messages at a time and 'drag and drop' them into the newly created folder in the IMAP account. Sometime I ‘drag and drop’ and TB doesn’t do anything. It going to be tedious to get all my email moved from POP to IMAP. Of course, I will do it if necessary but is there some other method of moving the sub folders from the POP to the IMAP account that is faster ?

I created IMAP accounts for my two other POP accounts and I only had to move the Inbox mail from POP to IMAP. One of the POP accounts only had the Inbox and Trash folders and the other one had those 2 plus five sub folders. One of these folders have 3381 messages. Had to move them 100 or so at a time. The other 4 folders had a small number of messages and transferred easily. Deleting the POP accounts at that point was no problem.

So, again, my biggest concern is deleting the main POP account and TB deleting the sub folders. If I have to get them moved before deleting, so be it.

Thanks for any help.

I want to backup the entire T-bird email database (all my emails) outside of T-bird as simply as possible. How does one do this in, I hope, one easy step? Note that I have 8 accounts (1 is g-mail). (I don't know which category this fits into.)

I just installed Thunderbird, linked it to my primary email account (ok!) and then tried to import one year's worth of email messages exported from my Apple Mail client as .mbox folders with an underlying folder structure (1 per month). Thunderbird went away for about 2 hours "downloading" and importing ( ... looking good!), but at the end my "Local Folder: Apple Mail Import" still shows no messages. Where are they and how can I access them in the Thunderbolt client?

I am trying to copy a large number of emails (about 1,000) from one folder (which in on gmail) to a local folder. However, TB seems to be not up to the task. I can move one email at a time but that, of course, is not practical for my purposes. However, even if I break it down into 30 or 40 emails at a time, it copies some of them and not others. Anyone know what the problem is? I will admit that some of the emails are quite large (5-10 MB). Could this be the issue? Are there limits on the size of a folder? How do I know what those limits are?

Working with TB 128.11.0esr (64-bit) on a Macbook running Sequoia 15.4.1.

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can offer.

The 'Sent' file in my 'Mail' folder exceeds 3 GB (3,224,360,399 bytes) and is not being read in the TB Mail window. How can I reduce the size of this file AND save messages???

'Sent' message folder IS searchable!!!

How do I make a backup copy of my Thunderbird email client, saving all the subfolders? I would like to then uninstall Thunderbird and then reinstall it, as a new user, and without losing any of my old user folders. Thanks. After I do this, will I be able to reload all the old subfolders and read those messages?

Hi there,

My email provider has just migrated my email address to a new server, which all went smoothly in the end. I thought that would be the hard part but it's actually Thunderbird that is giving me headaches.

I can send and receive mails fine but need to set up my Thunderbird folders again and copy in all my old emails. In other words, a new account has been set up for the same email address and I have kept the old account for the same email address until I have copied out everything I need from it.

But copying folders and mails doesn't always work and there seems to be absolutely no logic behind it - sometimes it works and something it doesn't.

Thunderbird won't let me copy my "Customers" folder with 30 subfolders in it so I have to do each of these manually. Again, some work, some don't.

Most of the time, an error message or three pops up because the old address wants me to enter my password again, which is no longer valid. And that usually scuppers any attempt to copy a folder manually.

I have unticked the three boxes under account settings so that it doesn't look for new mails every X minutes, when starting up, etc.

Is there any clever way I can avoid all this? Would it help if I did all this offline?

And does anyone know why the blasted folders are so difficult to copy?!!

Very grateful for any tips - thanks,

Ian

How can I install Thunderbird on an external USB drive for my Mac, and, import an mbox to it (or a bunch of mboxes?) that also lives on that external drive? And keep this email account data disconnected from the original account it came from, that is, do NOT have it sync with Gmail? Perhaps it's best if I describe my situation and the result I'm trying to achieve.... (sorry for the length of this question; I'm trying to be precise and comprehensive at the same time 😬)

Situation: 1. Used macOS Mail for years, to manage a Gmail account 2. Recently used takeout.google.com to download the mbox for this account, which turned out to be 91.01GB (!) 3. I tried using macOS Mail on another computer to open it, and it's not happening; file seems too large; I get an error message saying the Mac's memory has been used up and Mail has stopped working 4. I'm currently waiting for a subsequent Google Takeout download that I expect will consist of many, many mbox files (each mbox corresponding to its own label, according to How to Download/Export Emails with Google Takeout) 5. I have limited space on my computer and would like to avoid accommodating 91.01+GB of historical email data

Desired result: 1. I'm basically trying to create a back-up of all my Gmail emails so that... 2. I can delete a bunch of them, reorganize them, etc. using my macOS Mail program, while being confident that... 3. I can always return to the easily accessible and searchable emails in Thunderbird

Add'l Thoughts/Specific questions: 1. Can I install and run the macOS version of Thunderbird on an external USB thumbdrive by simply dragging the TB app icon to the external drive to start the installation process? 2. Assuming TB has successfully been installed on the external drive, how do I make sure TB knows that the data from the mbox(es) I import should "live" on the external drive as well?

Thank you so much for reading and in advance for your advice.

I have TBird version: 128.6.1 esr (64 bit).

I have several accounts and I want to back up just one of them. However, they all use the same folder (.../.thunderbird/<name>.default) for storage so Export only wants to store this folder. Drilling down using "Browse", I see that below that are all the folders stored as ".../.thunderbird/<name>.default/Mail/<My account>". If I just copy this folder, can I restore this account in the future if I copy it back to this location? I want to retain the contents as the account is going to be closed and removed from its server. Thank you.