[CentOS] RESTORING THUNDERBIRD FILES

Tue Mar 4 05:17:25 UTC 2008
Chris Geldenhuis <chris.gelden at iafrica.com>

Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Chris Geldenhuis wrote:
>   
>> This morning I wanted to check my mail, but when I opened Thunderbird,
>> it asked me to set up a mail account. 
>>     
>
> are you sure you didnt install a thunderbird / firefox from outside the
> yum repo's ?
>
>   
>> I saved the contents of the previous .thunderbird file structure with
>> tar and created a new mail account with the same details (name, isp,
>> pasword, servers etc.) as the previous account.
>>     
>
> you should be able to untar the .thunderbird tarball into another place,
> and then basically just move the email files into place in the current
> ~/.thunderbird
>
> remember to note where the email is expected, and there will be files
> per folder and an index for each one called the <foldername>.msf - you
> want to get all those over to the new instance.
>
> Also, you might need to rename of the files if you now have new folders
> with the same name ( eg. inbox )
>
> ----
>
> now having said that, before you do anything, check ~/.thunderbird for
> more than 1 directory called <something random>.default, and check the
> profiles.ini file in the same place. its possible you are just looking
> at a new profile, and switching over to the older profile will be all
> you need.
>
> And then you can work out howto get emails from one side to the other.
>
>   
Thanks Karanbir,

I will work on this when I get back from work tonight. There are two 
directories <something random>.default. When profiles.ini is set to use 
the one created when I recreated my mail connection, Thunderbird starts 
up with none of my history (as expected). When I edit profiles.ini to 
use the other (older) setup and start Thunderbird it starts the "wizard" 
to create a new connection - so clearly something has been corrupted in 
that setup. I will try to copy the important data from there to the new 
setup.

ChrisG