Problems Restoring Profiles with Thunderbird?

February 4, 2007 6:08 PM

My boss' laptop died last week. I "restored" his Thunderbird profile from his old data (we got it off the old hard drive) onto a new Vista machine, and everything came through - even the POP configs etc. - but he lost all his old emails for people after the letter 'H.' Does anyone understand the Thunderbird data structure enough to help me look for the rest?

Or point me to a better documented place on the web for Thunderbird? I believe the data is there. Thanks a lot!

posted by wavejumper to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

http://forums.mozillazine.org - they're not the most reliable in terms of answering your questions, but when they do, it's usually easy to follow and does the trick.

This is, of course, in no way meant to devalue life on the green.
posted by sjuhawk31 at 7:14 PM on February 4, 2007

Mozilla stores its messages in the mbox format. It's a plain-text format that can be opened with a text editor or parsed with scripts. Good luck with the recovery effort.
posted by chrisamiller at 9:30 PM on February 4, 2007

Just for reference, I once had an mbox import go wonky and ended up having to install every different email program I could find to try to import and then export again to recover a seemingly corrupted file (this was on OS X). It finally work (I think Mulberry finally did the trick) and I was able to get back all my emails and related attachments.

You might find that doing something similar might help if you can't access the emails any other way.
posted by qwip at 9:57 PM on February 4, 2007

I'm sure it is there, as the emails are not sorted (as far as I know) in mbox format, so it would be unlikely that arbitrarily to have deleted files in alphabetical order.

A few things to try (obviously backup both everything first).

-Try deleting the msf file of one of the folders which are incompletely displaying. There is one corresponding to every folder, so for INBOX (no extension), there will be an INBOX.msf and so on. (The msf file is an index of the emails in the folder, if it is deleted or not present, Thunderbird will reindex the folder when it starts). The emails are in the file without an extension, do NOT delete that.

-Try just importing the mbox (Tools->Import) and see are the emails displayed that way?

-Try importing one file using this extension:
MboxImport 0.5.8 - The Extensions Mirror
posted by Boobus Tuber at 3:31 AM on February 5, 2007