Can't find existing mail on NAS
I have my Mail stored on a NAS (in X:\My Documents\Mail) and it has been working fine for years. But recently the NAS failed and I have to go back to my 2 week old backups.
I have an internal HDD (drive D:) that is not being used for much else so I copied my Mail from the backup version of X:\My Documents\Mail into the internal drive D:\My Documents\Mail. Then, using "Control Panel\Administrative Tools\Computer Management\Storage\Disk Management" I changed the drive letter of the internal drive from D: to X:.
Now my mail files are stored in X:\My Documents\Mail - just like the good old days.
But when Thunderbird starts up it is an almost totally blank screen. The Toolbars are there but nothing else, and even then, the Toolbars are not working. There is just nothing there. No mail, no folders, no account details, no Address Book, nothing. Not even an error message.
I notice in Task Manager there is a little Thunderbird activity at first, but that soon dwindles to zero and still I have that near-blank screen.
There are some other applications that expect to find their files in X:\My Documents and they are working just fine on the newly restored internal drive X:. So that redefinition of drive letters seems to be OK.
What have I done wrong? How can I retrieve all my mail, folders, address book, etc?
Wayne Mery trɔe
All Replies (5)
It looks like noone else can help with this problem?
Here is a copy of my profiles.ini that seemed to work just fine before ...
[Install8216C80C92C4E828] Default=X:\My Documents\Mail\Thunderbird\3lhtiipj.default Locked=1
[General] StartWithLastProfile=1 Version=2
[Profile1] Name=default-release IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/x1x25q65.default-release
[Profile0] Name=default IsRelative=0 Path=X:\My Documents\Mail\Thunderbird\3lhtiipj.default Default=1
[Install2029D89AF84CD3BE] Default=Profiles/x1x25q65.default-release Locked=1
But now that I have restored all my data files to drive X: this same profile will not bring up my existing mail.
Can anyone see anything obvious here please
Tony
Thunderbird uses UNC, so the remote locations as in the form \\\\Servername\share Only windows uses drive letters to any real extent. Data locations are not just stored in the profiles.ini file and these days manual editing is asking for trouble.
So I suggest you use about:profiles to create a new profile and point it to the existing data location. I would also suggest you get rid of anything like "My Documents" in the location. Thunderbird was modified some years ago to balk at storage in the windows "my documents" structure. You never know when a same name on a different location might cause unintended issues.,
Thanks Matt for your reply.
I have learned something today. Thunderbird is not well suited to the Windows environment! I guess I will have to upgrade to a Windows client, even (gasp) Outlook in a search for reliability. It has been working fine for many years and I thought I was doing all the right things by backing up the Mail folder. But unfortunately that proved to be unreliable and I am not sure what I have done wrong. What is the recommended method to back up Thunderbird Mail?
The old profiles.ini has always been on the system disk and nothing has changed there. It is only the Mail folder on the NAS that is somehow different.
Anyway, I did as you suggested and created a new profile and yes it is working fine now, gathering my incoming mail as usual. But I have lost all my old mail saved for many years, and the Address Book with all my contacts! Sigh.
The new working profile has its mail stored in the default location on the system disk: "C:\Users\MyName\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles" and it uses the folder "3lhtiipj.default" to store everything there on the system disk. No problems.
You suggested there might be a problem with using My Documents. So I moved the old "My Documents\Mail" files out of My Documents on the NAS and created a new "Mail" folder in the root directory on the NAS, copying all the existing mail folders and files from My Documents, keeping the same directory structure.
I edited the new working version of profiles.ini to point to the files on drive X, now in the new Mail folder. But starting Thunderbird results in that same blank screen!
Changing profiles.ini back to "IsRelative=1 and to the local mail folder gets me back to my new, working mail system again. So I am still on the air.
Next, I copied the old Mail files from the NAS over to the new location on the system disk, where my newly configured, working Thunderbird is storing my new mail. It happens to be using the same profile name of "3lhtiipj.default". So, nothing to edit there, same profile name, same profiles.ini. But Thunderbird starts with the dreaded blank screen again!
Can you or someone please tell me if there is some recovery option to extract the old mail and/or the old address book? And please tell me how experienced Thunderbird users back up their mail.
Thanks again for your help and support.
I just thought I should close this thread by letting you know I have abandoned Thunderbird and “upgraded” to Outlook.
Yes, I have lost several years’ mail, but the Sun still came up this morning. Life goes on.
I do believe Thunderbird has much more to offer than Outlook, but this is not the first time I have lost mail from Thunderbird and I know Outlook is designed to run under Windows. All I want is to read and send personal emails. Simple. Outlook does that, and I do not need additional features that Thunderbird might offer.
Thanks to all who offered help.
Tony