Old emails in Thunderbird vanish after trying to setup a new account.

January 15, 2007 5:41 PM

Thunderbird swallowed my emails while I was trying to setup an account for an additional email id.

I was/am using TB to access my Yahoo account. Everything was perfect until I tried to add another Yahoo account in TB. The first account was for email id [e-mail] and the second one for [e-mail]

I think the new account has been overwritten on the old one (If I again try to make an account named xyz.xyz, I am told that the account already exists. But the screen shows only one account, xyz_xyz) and all the emails in its Inbox and Sent folders etc. have vanished.)

The /Profiles/mail folder shows two folders called localhost (which I think is for the new account ) and localhost-3 (which is for the old account) and seems to contains my emails in files named Inbox, Sent etc.

How do I get TB to open the files in localhost-3 and read the emails in it (for account xyz_xyz) into the Inbox/Sent/etc folders? I don't want to just delete the entire account as that would also mean deleting the filters associated with it. And finally I want to get rid of xyz.xyz completely.

Any suggestions as to what I should do? Thanks.




Thanks

posted by sk381 to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

Close thunderbird. Make a backup of your entire profile. Copy the contents of localhost-3 into localhost (in the live profile, not the backup). Start up thunderbird, see if your mail is there. If so, close thunderbird again, and delete localhost-3.
For further reading, see here (point 4) and and here.
posted by zamboni at 6:23 PM on January 15, 2007