Yonke imikhiqizo Community Forum

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?

I’m on a Mac using the Sequoia OS (not ready to update yet to Tahoe). I recently left Microsoft Outlook, my e-mail client for years, because of all the crashing and when I would update, all the stored e-mails disappeared. I am now using Apple Mail and the export function doesn’t work most of the time. Apple tech support did some things that told me they are automatic backups, but I can’t see them.

I use Thunderbird on an old PC and would like to also use it on my Mac. However, when attempting to import, it starts and finishes in about one second, importing nothing. The files are in .mbox format. What am I doing wrong trying to import these files?

Hi, I am very frustrated not with you, but with AOL. It appears that they did something on their end last evening (10/28/25) that made third party software not work. I have been on the phone with their tech support for over 4 hours and they can not explain, nor fix the fact that I can't get email with Thunderbird and also on my phone with Edison. If I export all of the current information in my current account (tied to POP), using the export feature and put it on my hard drive and call them back, can I then import it to (IMAP)? Their potential suggestion although the account was set in POP format last October when I purchased this new computer.

Please I am at my wits end as I have lost a days work dealing with this.

Thanks, John

I have a backup.bak file.

My computer was re-set and I lost everything.

How can I restore my new downloaded Thunderbird, using this backup.bak file.

Thanks.

Rik

Hi, Can I have in thunderbird several separate local folders whose data is stored in different directories on my hard disk? if yes, how can I configure this? so far I have one lokal folder (next to many email accounts)... and if yes, can I move one of these folders to a different machine with another thunderbird and import it there?

kind regards Chris

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?

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

I am using Thunderbird 128.0 under Windows 10. I routinely archive old emails, with the archives stored in my local Thunderbird folders.

I'd like to periodically delete the older archives, but to keep some sort of backup copy. Is there any way I can copy or export the archive folders to somewhere else, such as another folder on my computer or an external drive?

And if I succeed in doing this, will it be possible to search the copy, and to restore individual messages if necessary?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Mike

I have a bunch of folders and messages in an email tree in Tbird's Local Folders and I would like to move the root of those local folders and everything below that folder root to a Tbird remote email server which is an account on my Tbird tree. My Tbird is using IMAP to communicate with the desired server.

Is it possible to just drag the root of the tree from the Local Folders and plop it onto the desired server and all the messages would get moved to that remote server and everything would just magically appear there? Is it possible that it's that easy? :-)

I want to ask before I try it and really mess things up.

Thanks!

I have been accessing an e-mail account via web client for many years. The user interface is cumbersome in that it gives limited ability to transfer e-mails to ASCII files on my hard drive (Windows 11 laptop). I have been told that Thunderbird makes this easier and faster, and installed it with this in mind. But first I need to transfer the the e-mails to my local computer and remove them from the server.

I don't know what the verb for this is in Thunderspeak, but "synchronize" goes way beyond what I want to do, transferring data in both directions. All I want to do is download a sub-set of all e-mails to a local copy from which I can make ASCII files.

In the Thunderbird Help section I have found instructions for changing the settings to allow it to download ALL messages at start-up. I only want to download a sub-set of older messages.

The most frustrating part is I have succeeded at doing this twice with older versions of Thunderbird, but don't know how I did it.

Any help would be appreciated.

Hello.

My Thunderbird (115.18.0 (64-bit) SUPERNOVA on Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS, focal) is setup to download messages locally.

I recently had a hard disc crash on the mail server that one of the mail accounts that I administer uses (used). This means that in Thunderbird I still see the mails and can open them and see the message contents. - I also found (and made a backup copy) of the mbox file that holds these messages.

When I start up Thunderbird I can move one, maybe two messages to the new server location or to a local folder but then the "drag-and-drop" doesn't do anything. If I restart Thunderbird can move a couple more. - It looks like Thunderbird is trying to connect to the lost server and so the message move stops happening.

There are over two thousand messages so this isn't a good solution.

I tried using the off-line mode but received a message to say that messages were not downloaded. - I have a connection to several mail servers at different locations and perhaps not all a set to download messages locally (?).

Other than using a tool like md2mb, which means learning all the various options I'd like to have a more "drag and drop" facility.

Any ideas ? All suggestions gratefully received ;)

-Graham-

I've been using Thunderbird for many years. When I first set it up on my Windows 10 computer I had the mail files in my "Documents" file (for easier cloud backup), rather in "AppData." Unfortunately I can't remember how I did that.

Now I am forced to move everything to a Windows 11 computer and I can't figure out how to properly transfer the "Mail" file. I have the profile transferred, but not the Mail file. Any help will be most appreciated!

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.)

David: You were right, I'd taken the file instead of the folder. This morning I erased the flash and started again. Copied the folder. Moved to Laptop, pasted the folder. No questions of overwriting or anything. However when I went into Tbird, it was screwed up. It runs, but there are messages missing, none of my mailboxes were there, so I assume none of my addresses as well. There were 4 messages in the IN box. There was 1 new msg that came in when I opened the program, and it properly brought over 3 from the old folder. There were 0 drafts, and I have a slew of them on my old app. It brought over a lot of sent msgs which might be okay, hard to sort them all out. Several of the messages were dated no more recently than 8-30. I use my computer every day, there are posts in here up until this morning. It brought over 0 archived, should be some. And in Junk it brought 213 over, but in the old app I have 1. In Trash it brought over 571 msgs, some of which may be correct it's hard to figure it all out. If I did something wrong, why didn't it affect Everything? I'm so dispirited and exhausted by now I'm thinking it might be easier to re-enter the contacts and mailboxes by hand! If you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them. I'm writing to you on my old machine because yesterday I had problems using this site with the laptop. Thanks, Stacy

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.

If I have synchronized my email host to Thunderbird locally, THEN switch to a new email host (where my IMAP on the new host is empty), will Thunderbird then synchronize everything stored locally from the old host UP to my new host? Assuming, of course, that I change my connection settings in Thunderbird from my old host to my new email host.

I am transitioning from Google Workspace to an IMAP email hosted by InMotion Hosting. Wish me luck.

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

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.