Restoring backed up thunderbird E-mails
 

Hi,

I did a fresh install of SUSE 10.1 and I saved my *.defaults file as per instructions on the mozilla website. I followed the instructions to get all my old E-mails back by replacing the new *.defaults file and updating the profiles.ini file.

When I log in howevber all is not well, it keeps asking me to set up a new account. I don't want to do this, I want my old one!!! I have some important E-mails and E-mail addresses, so I need them VERY badly. Can anyone help?

Mat

Go ahead and create the new account. Then copy the contets of your back-upped *.defaults foled into the newly generated .backup folder and you should be home safe (depending on how you did the backup you may have to change ownership of the files)

That doesn't work, as I said previously, I followed the instructions only to be frustrated again and again. Thunderbird overwrites my folder with a new one.

Any other suggestions?

Following this advice, to let you know where you're going wrong I get a pop up asking me if I want to import from mozilla 1.x, I click next. I then receive a notice letting me know that thing like preferences, mail boxes etc were "successfully imported". After this it asks me to set up a new account and I am back to square 1.

I am begining to thing that the ONLY way to do this is the following.

1) For those E-mails you wish to keep, copy them to a text file and save them in text format.
2) For any E-mail addresses you wish to keep, you copy them to a text file and input them manually when you reinstall.

First of all, I haven't read the instructions so I don't know what you did exactly.
I can only tell you what I did and that it worked.

FIRST I created the new account
THEN I substituted the contents of the .defaults folder created in that process with the contents of the backed up .default folder.

More specifically the really imortant stuff is located under *.default/Mail/<accountname>
The address book is afile called abook.mab located directly under *.defaults.

I tried everal ways, including the one you mentioned and it still failed. I can only conclude that it is not possible to back up E-mails.

The new account has file xxxxx,default and my old account is yyyyyy.default so I deleted the old one and substituted the new one and edited the profile.ini file as per the instructions and still no dice.

I can't send from my E-mail either!!!

Mat

This is so easy to do that I just can't see where you are having a problem.
I saved the folder ~./thunderbird/<bunch_of_numbers>.default and the ~./thunderbird/profiles.ini from my Suse operating system and put it into ~./thunderbird on a Mandriva system. The new .default folder had a different name, so I deleted the old one and copying the profiles.ini file asked if I wanted to over write the old one so I did.
Didn't even need to create an account and the emails showed up along with the spam folder and filter settings.

It doesn't work.

I only saved the <bunch of numbers & letters>.default and wrote that to the new system and corrected the profiles.ini file with my old <bunch of numbers & letters>.default file and when I restarted thunderbird, I got a message to say that some things were imported but had to redefine my account name and then it overwrote my told <bunch of numbers & letters>.default file!!!!

I just installed fc5 and needed to get all my fc4 settings to work so...
I first copied the .thunderbird folder over into my new home and installed thunderbird after that. Everything worked immediately.

Hi matuk_444

I'm not sure what is happening here, but I do know from experience that this does work. In fact, I've even copied Tbird settings from a linux machine to windows without any problems. One thing you might try is using the full path to the .default folder you restored and change the IsRelative=1 line to IsRelative=0 in the profiles.ini file just above the path. Also, double check to make sure you are editing the correct profiles.ini file and not a backup copy (I know this is obvious but sometimes it is the little things that get us). One other thing is if you made the original backup to CD or DVD, often times the files are restored as read only, in which case you will need to change the permissions for the folder and files.

The only time I've not been able to make this work is when I had something wrong with the backup (fortunately I had another recent backup to use instead). Hopefully this isn't the situation you are in.

A whole new mind boggling error. I tried again to install my old folder for thinderbird. So I copied the *.defaults folder over and I updated the profiles.ini file and I went to fire up thunderbird and I received the error message: Thunderbird is already running, but not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Thinderbird process, or restart your system.

I checked the process list and thinderbird wasn't running and I restarted and still no cigar.

Any hints?

Mat

I forgot to add, When first starting up thunderbird, I don't even get the option to import anything. There is only one option and that is don't import anything.

Mat

I got similar messages some time ago from firefox. It didn't show up under my processes either, but I got no error message when I did a '#killall firefox' meaning it did kill something and after that firefox worked fine again.

Have you tried doing a new tbird install (rpm -e thunderbird, yum install thunderbird) with the backup already in your ~/.thunderbird folder?

I might try an update to see if that works and I will get back to you.

Mat

Didn't work...