I have a family member whose hard drive crashed with all his data, including Thunderbird e-mail, on it. I have convinced him to start using Linux, but the crashed operating system (and/or crashed HD--we're not sure yet) was running Windows, and in trying to pull everything valuable off the drive, he has installed Windows on a new HD. Does anyone know how to let the new HD's copy of Thunderbird read the e-mail retrieved from the old HD? We copied the old e-mails (contained in files such as "inbox.something"--I've already forgotten the extensions) to the corresponding Windows folder on the new HD, but that did not make them readable by Thunderbird; it then displayed no e-mails at all.

I dealt with this problem before--finding e-mails on an old hard drive, and then trying to read them with an e-mail program on a new HD--but never solved it. (It was less important then, because the e-mails were eight years old and just curiosities.)

When installing Thunderbird or creating a new profile a profiles.ini is created or modified. This file should reside in the users Thunderbird folder. The unique "Path=" in profiles.ini must match settings like "mail.root.imap", "mail.root.none" and "mail.root.pop3" in the users prefs.js configuration. Should be easy to grep for all locations. If that all matches then visually inspecting all files that are the result of `find /path/to/.thunderbird/ -type f -not -iname \*.msf -a -not -iname \*.js -a -not -iname \*.jar -a -not -iname \*.ics -a -not -iname \*.dat -a -not -iname \*.manifest -a -not -iname \*.dic -a -not -iname \*.aff -a -not -iname \*.xpm -a -not -iname \*.mfasl -a -not -iname \*.html -a -not -iname \*.rdf -a -not -iname \*.sqlite -a -not -iname \*.so -a -not -iname \*.xpt -a -not -iname \*.txt -a -not -iname \*.sig -a -not -iname \*.db -a -not -iname \*.log -a -not -iname \*.ini -a -not -iname \*.mab -a -not -iname \*.xml -a -not -iname \*.cache -a -not -iname .parentlock -print0 | xargs -0 -iX file 'X'` will show if they are empty, contain plan text or Something Else (possibly corrupted).