Yeah, that account directory option has a lot to answer for. It does not warn you that any sort of recovery becomes a major problem. It requires no skill to set up and significant levels of knowledge to recover from a failure involving it.

But I do not know what "big mess" actually means? do you have access to your mail are the folders wrong?

Nor do I grok "Also tried importexport add on. No joy" Why not? What was the issue there?

You have got to post enough information to bring folks here up to speed. We know exactly what you tell us, and we guess the rest. The more fact the less guessing and usually the better the responses..

OK, more detail!

I've been redirecting email data storage for years to "D:\Thunderbird Mark", leaving the profile on the C: drive, following this sort of process: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_mail_storage_location_%28Thunderbird%29

C: drive was wiped, leaving the data, but losing the profile.

Reinstalled Thunderbird. When I tried re-pointing the Thunderbird local data storage to "D:\Thunderbird Mark", it didn't seem to do anything. Tried again to "D:\Thunderbird Mark\Mail" and it spent the next several hours loading all of the old emails. It created a number of extra directories as well as burying the ones originally I'd set up in 'Local Folders'. I wasn't able to access any of the old emails however. I'm guessing this was a pretty simplistic way to go about recovery, as it misses all of the other data in the higher directory, but it was worth a shot.

Uninstalled Thunderbird, and deleted the profile again. Reinstalled, ready to try something else. Have tried a few Add On tools... 'ImportExport NG', 'Address Books Synchronizer', and possibly another, if only to recover my addres book. None seemed able to import anything in the 'D:\Thunderbird Mark' files.

Thanks for your attention, this is simultaneously frightening and liberating to think about this much data lost!

Sorry to keep asking, but is there some sort of recovery process that I can attempt?

Mark said

Sorry to keep asking, but is there some sort of recovery process that I can attempt?

I have been repeating basically the same thing on this forum for the best part of a decade.

Can you locate the original MBOX files,that is key to recovering anything. See https://thunderbirdtweaks.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html

Personally I would suggest you create a new profile using the new profile wizard and that you create it on the D: drive in a folder other than the one you used before.

Then locate the mbox files and move them t the Mail\local folders location in that profile and start Thunderbird. upon start you should see the contents of the mbox files in folders with the same name as the mbox file.

Thanks Matt, I was able to recover... well, maybe everything :)

When copying everything over into a fresh profile, I was prompted to overwrite all files. Tried this affirmatively the first time, and the profile was corrupted. Tried again without copying the duplicated files, and the profile opened up OK.

It took many hours to churn through the old emails, I presume for search indexing. There are a number of directories in Local Folders/Trash, most of which are empty, but not all.

The address books are not recovered yet... I presume I'll need to copy & overwrite those files. If you have some hints here that would be great.

Thanks very much for the help! Mark