Disappearing Thunderbird rss feeds

March 9, 2009 5:25 AM

This morning I opened Thunderbird to check my favourite feeds and an entire subfolder has gone missing. I'm quite certain I didn't delete it accidently. I'm running XP, Thunderbird is V 2.0.0.19. The remainder of my feeds appear to be intact including a subfolder with several feeds in it. Where did they go?

I tend to back things up but can't find a backup opml file so that's not an option. Is there some way to rollback my Thunderbird profile that I'm not thinking of?

Help!

posted by Gooberoo to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Have you looked in your profile folder to see if the OPML file (or however Tbird stores it) is actually there?
posted by COD at 5:55 AM on March 9, 2009

@ COD

Eureka! The folders/files are there. If I look under Documents and Settings\***** *****\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\2wrrp3di.default\Mail\News & Blogs there are two folders:
Google searches.sbd (shows up in T-bird)
Science.sbd (doesn't show up in T-bird, has an Automation.sbd subfolder)

Why is T-bird not seeing the Science folder anymore?
posted by Gooberoo at 7:21 AM on March 9, 2009

Whenever I've had problems with RSS feeds in TB, deleting "feeditems.rdf" and "feeds.rdf" from the "News and Blogs" folder has worked for me. It apparently resets the feeds and marks as new everything from the time the feeds went down.
posted by worldswalker at 8:45 AM on March 9, 2009

@ worldswalker

This doesn't seem to reset the folder structure. I backed up the two files, closed Thunderbird, deleted the two files and then re-opened Thunderbird. As you mention it resets the read status but my folders are still missing.

I'm going to do some Mozilla forum searching now that I know the relevant files! Thanks for that info.
posted by Gooberoo at 12:24 PM on March 9, 2009

There may well have been others since last summer, but the two threads that I have bookmarked are here and here.
posted by worldswalker at 12:42 PM on March 9, 2009

@ worldswalker

Thanks for the suggestions. In the end I could find nothing out there to tell me why Thunderbird started ignoring the one .sbd folder.

My inelegant solution was to close Thunderbird, zip the .sbd folder as backup and then move the folder's contents to the main News & Blogs folder. Then re-open Thunderbird and re-create the folder structure. So far so good!
posted by Gooberoo at 6:11 AM on March 10, 2009