Yonke imikhiqizo Community Forum

Hello! After a Windows 10 update (around September 5, 2026), Thunderbird stopped receiving Gmail messages. Laptop: Dell, Windows 10. Account: Gmail. The problem occurs both in Russia and abroad. My emails were organized into a folder structure created inside Thunderbird. The most important thing for me is to restore this internal folder structure with all its messages. What we tried: • We kept the old Thunderbird profile folder as a backup and created a new profile. • In the new profile we switched the account to POP3 so that emails are stored on the computer. • Thunderbird downloaded the emails, but only up to a certain date (around 2023). Newer messages did not download. • The old folder structure did not appear in the new profile. Thunderbird version: [version]. Authentication method: [OAuth2 / normal password]. Error message: [error text]. Could you please advise: 1. How to restore my old folder structure from the saved profile folder? 2. How to make Thunderbird download all emails, including the recent ones, and keep receiving new mail? Thank you!

Hi, hoping someone could help as I am struggling to get my information back. I am using Ubuntu Cinnamon.

Thunderbird crashed last night, wouldn't work, tried safe mode. Nothing fixed it. It hung when opening up and after 30 seconds said force quit. So I was forced to reinstall. I did a manual backup but not using the inbuilt tool as I couldn't get into Thunderbird. I just copied the data from username/.thunderbird

After spending a long time uninstalling. Because it reached 78% and then crashed on uninstall. Eventually after reading various pages on the internet I managed to reinstall from the Ubuntu software manager using the latest snap version. (Which I am not sure was what was actually installed previously).

However having used thunderbird for nearly 20 years or so. I have a username/.thunderbird folder. And when I moved to this platform, I have a snap/thunderbird/common/.thunderbird folder.

I installed this new distro 2 years ago, and remember having issues getting my data into the system under Snap. But eventually got it to work somehow back then.

However since reinstalling I cannot see the last 2 years of emails, archives or data. It has launched into a 2 year old profile. I appear to have lost most of the emails from the archive folders (but kept the folders) removed all of the personal folders but then dumped all those emails into my inbox. Giving me 6500 emails that were in various personal folders. (I don't get 6500 emails in a year so don't know what has happened.) It has even changed all of the new dates to the US format, so nothing makes any sense.

I now have 2 Thunderbird profiles, over 12GB in size. And have apparently lost 2 years of my life. But reading support pages, suggests I should be okay because thunderbird doesn't delete data when you reinstall?

I have looked through various other threads which talk about pointing it at the profiles and mail boxes, however nothing works.

Any help much needed.

Once again the latest firefox browser has issues so I rolled back the last stable version. It keeps prompting me to create a new profile. I want to use the previous profile that has all my setting and bookmarks. I got to about:profiles and selected the profile i want to make default and it will not add it to firefox. How can I do this?

At first deployment of multiple profiles in early 2026, my use was really intuitive and I was able to understand the FAQ and Community notes. Early October, the releases started to implement some refinements. I am not understanding these refinements and while I am seeing the error message (attached), I am not understanding what the fix is to use my additional profiles (two), int the past month, I have not found a way to get to my two additional profiles.

My environment: Windows 11 Pro - Firefox 158.0 (64 bit) I have Profiles "Original" and two others. I have one single Mozilla account. I copied my two profiles from original and had made great progress culling the profile passwords and bookmarks, I have only been syncing my original profile two my two cellphones. 95% of my use is from desktop Firefox.

Attached is a well documented result error but I am not locating how to get to the profiles I had created from the attached error message.

I have a proper profile stored in an backup and 1 *.msf wasn´t restored on the new computer, but it is needed as soon as possible. My tries to restore it wasn´t successfull, there are no needed things to restore. The needed msf is located in the new profile, and I can´t see the item. Therefore I need help for restoring this particular *.msf. Greets The Texman aka K.-P. Aldag

I am installing Thunderbird for the first time on a new win 11 box. During the install, a "special" email account was created (not by me). I would rather not have the account, but when I right click on the account, the "delete" option is not there, and the account description (immediately below Account Settings) is "The following is a special account. There are no identities associated with it.". Is it possible to delete this account or at least hide it on the accounts list?

I did an uninstall/reinstall hoping to start over, but that did not do a complete reset, and the new install came up with the same accounts (including the "special") as I had set up before.

So, can I remove the account from the existing install, or can you tell me how to do a "clean" reinstall that forgets all previous account information?

I am a bit of a noob, and probably out of my depth, so please bear with me. It also is a bit of a confusing situation so I hope that I can explain it clearly.

A while ago, Thunderbird stopped working. Whenever I tried starting it up, I got an error message saying that Thunderbird wasn't responding. I thought there might be a problem with some update so I decided that I would reinstall the program. As I went to back up my profile, I found out that there were actually two profile folders where in the past I would only find one. I chose to back up both, and procede with de- and re-installing Thunderbird. After doing so I tried to integrate the old profiles back into the new installation. At first, I chose the largest of the to profile maps and copied it where I found it before the re-installation. I created a new profile using the old profile folder through the User Profile menu. This seemed to work! However, I noticed something. I have two e-mail accounts running in this profile. One IMAP and one POP. I noticed that the POP account was missing about a years worth of old e-mails. As if it stopped saving them at some point. I figured they must be in the other profile folder I found before the re-installation. I tried creating a new profile with this profile but when starting up Thunderbird afterwards I once again got the 'Thunderbird isn't responding' message. So I reverted back to the first profile I made, the one with the missing e-mails. Appart from those e-mails, it seemed to be working well. To get back what was missing, I tried copying the files in the "inbox.sbd" of the back up that wasn't responding into the back up that was responding, thinking that if it messed something up, I could just CTRL + Z my way out of trouble. It seemed that there were three locations in the functioning back up that I could copy the files into, each having the server name of the e-mail account that I was missing e-mails from. I tried copying the files in each of them, each time removing the files through 'undo' before trying the next location. As this seemed unsuccesfull I tried restarting Thunderbird again (having removed the copied files from all locations) which resulted in the following error message:

In a pink screen that I have never seen before. After this I tried removing all profiles and starting again with a fresh copy of the backed up profile folder as I figured I might have accidentally changed something in the profile folder I was using. This however keeps giving the same error message.

Clearly, I messed something up. But I don't know what. Can anybody help? One last thing I noticed that in the 'Mail' folder within the profile folder, there where three folders with the server name before, now there is only one. I guess this is a clue?

All help is welcome!

Every time there is an update, Firefox creates a new profile and hides all passwords etc. It is therefore impossible to work with it now. With 157 I now have a worthless Firefox, because all links, passwords, settings etc have been cleared and a new profile has been created.

After new installation I want to use my profile of the former installation. In principle I followed the procedure of the article "An einem anderen Ort wiederherstellen". After that when starting thunderbird it always asks me to create a new account.

Does anyone know what is missing?

On linux, in the past, firefox kept all its data in home/{user}/.mozilla. This was changed at some pont to spread the data out into /home/{user}/.config, /home/{user}/.cache and maybe another place but when the change was made existing data was not moved and remained in /home/{user}/.mozilla. For my purposes I prefer to see the data in the old location. I make heave use of profiles and I store them on an encrypted partition and I have firejail setup to give access to the old location. Whart does Firefox look at to determine whether to look in the new locations or the old location? What is the new location of profile.ini?

I've read that I can create several Thunderbird profiles and load my desired Profile to startup and use the Profile Manager to switch profiles. I'm guessing that I can only load one profile into Thunderbird at a time (?).

And if I wanted to check emails from another profile I'd have to close or switch or somehow unload the current profile(?).

It would seem to me if it were possible to load more than one profile at a time, then if two profiles had the exact same mailbox account, it would cause problems(?).

Appreciate any input from those with experience in this.

I just updated my browser and now I am unable to access my work profile because FF made me choose my original profile because they both use the same email. I would rather kill the original account and get back my work one. Can I do this?

I use Thunderbird on multiple computers, sharing an NAS. One is Windows 10, one is Linux Mint. Both have Thunderbird 153.3.1esr installed. The email Profile and email file storage is on the NAS. The "home" folders on both machines have a profile.ini file that points to that shared profile. This worked fine for many years.

For perhaps 6 months i've only accessed email from Windows. Now i'm trying again to access from LinuxMint. It no longer works.

From Linux, at startup, Thunderbird complains that i'm trying to open my profile from "an older version of Thunderbird". A popup dialog claims "A newer version of Thunderbird may have made changes to your profile which are no longer compatible with this older version. " It offers to create a new profile.

First, the same version last edited the profile as is reading it. Second, i don't want to create a new profile, as the existing one has multiple email accounts at multiple domains, with multiple sigatures, and custom storage paths, etc. I tried profile manager, but it just takes me back to this dialog.

How do i get Thunderbird to use my existing shared email storage ?

Hi, I've three Browser profile, when I get new updates, no matter I at that moment be in which one of them but the update just reach one of the profiles. features like Built it VPN, weather widget and etc does not come to the others two. Please fix this one or if its a problem from me, guide me to fix it.

Title. Whenever I click the profile button on just this profile, it doesn't give me the option to switch to different profiles. This problem doesn't exist on my other profiles.