Where exactly did you copy the profile on the new system? Please provide the full path.

What folder exactly did you copy over? Please provide the folder name.

What is the contents of the profiles.ini file?

[user]\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles from old to new, same path.

profiles.ini

[General] StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0] Name=Jason Bradley IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/yttvh60u.default Default=1

And yes, that is the correct .default file name. The first listing in the profile Mail folder after the Local Folders is the one that Thunderbird is loading; it doesn't recognize any of the others (6 in all).

Please confirm you're using the correct profile folder. At the top right of the Thunderbird window, click the menu button , then select Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Folder > Open Folder

This should open the current profile folder in Windows Explorer. It should be yttvh60u.default as per your profiles.ini information.

Please also post your Troubleshooting Information. Press the "Copy text to clipboard button" and paste the information into your reply.

The first listing in the profile Mail folder after the Local Folders is the one that Thunderbird is loading; it doesn't recognize any of the others (6 in all).

Are you saying all 6 accounts are POP ones? Are you using Global Inbox for the missing 5 accounts? http://kb.mozillazine.org/Global_Inbox

Has all the profile data from the old system been successfully copied over to the new system? Please verify the actual mail folders exist on the new system.

Sorry about the delay; unfortunately life and work calling and am on the road for work. I won't get to test my theory until next weekend, but I think I may have found the culprit; I didn't set up the same user account name on the new system. Poking around the .js files I realized there were a lot of references to my old user account, which means the config is looking for a path that doesn't exist on that machine =P Going to set up a user account on there with the old name and see if I can get it to install and cooperate that way. Never occurred to me that every time I had transferred files before I had always used the same account name.

Really appreciate the help, and it will be a little bit before I get home to play with it but I will post the results.

Thanks!

I looked at two of my profiles recently, in Windows 10 and Linux, and both were littered, much to my surprise, with absolute pathnames to the mail store files. I'm pretty sure they haven't always been like that.

I have to say though that in one case, the absolute pathnames were wrong, i.e. they pointed to an unused profile location, and in any case, each was accompanied by a relative version of the same pathname, using a symbolic reference to the location. I removed all the absolute pathnames and of course it continued to work.

In both the cases I was looking at, the profile data is actually stored in a separate drive, which for me is a new arrangement, and I'd shrugged off this anomaly as due to this. But I do have another system where the profile data is in the traditional place i.e. C:\Users\...\AppData\... I'll have a look at that and report back on the presence (or not) of absolute pathnames.

I don't think the Thunderbird profile should be sensitive to the user account being used. That should be covered by what is in the profiles.ini file and shouldn't need to permeate into the data stores themselves.

Note that some add-ons are quite poorly behaved and do write absolute pathnames into the settings, and these will most certainly be sensitive to changes of user account or profile location.

So, while I'm hoping for you that you may have found a way to fix it, at the same time I'm disappointed that it might work that way.

Hmmm, yeah, same cr@p here:

user_pref("mail.server.server2.directory", "C:\\Users\\cjr\\AppData\\Roaming\\Thunderbird\\Profiles\\cjr_profile\\Mail\\Local Folders");
user_pref("mail.server.server2.directory-rel", "[ProfD]Mail/Local Folders");

The .js files are making a lot of references to the absolute path name on my old system. I figure I have three options. I can either delete the preference files and see if it will repopulate them, I can edit all of the JavaScript files which will take too long and is not happening, or I could just recreate the user account and recover everything that way. I will try deleting everything except for the mail accounts first off and see what Thunderbird does with it. I have backup copies so I'm not worried about tampering with it. Even with find and replace I'm still not going to find it every instance of a path name in all the description files. I'll experiment with it next weekend and post the results.