In Thunderbird, messages are stored as they are received, along with all headers and all attachments.

In your profile, there will be folders with no extension, such as Inbox. These are mailbox files. Each has an accompanying index file, in this example Inbox.msf. You don't need the msf files.

The profile folder is hidden, so to find it you'll need to enable displaying of hidden files.

mozmsgs is provided just to make the message contents available to Windows' searching mechanisms, so these files are not important to your restoration task.

I really don't like the business of setting mail account folder locations using the Local Directory option. It removes the particular folder from your profile and makes maintenance very much harder, since now only you will know where the re-located data lives. None of the usual techniques or tools for working with profiles will work with the detached data.

Your wisdom is appreciated and have currently created a new profile with the Local Folders on the same drive but am still not quite sure where the attachments are? And I backup the Profile regularly.

When you say " messages are stored as they are received, along with all headers and all attachments" - you ean they stored in the Profile?

Then copying the message from INBOX to a folder in Local Folder is just creating a "link" to the message contents in the Profile - correct?

Thank you for your time.

It's not a full filesystem. Files are used to emulate folders. When you move or copy a message from one Thunderbird folder to another, it is literally copied (and the original made invisible in the case of a move.) No links are used. You can see this for yourself if you inspect mailbox files with a text editor. Since the Local Folders account is also in the profile, it's not treated any differently to any other of your mail account folders.

Here is my problem with message content. Thought I had copied all message content from the "C" drive Profile INBOX to Local Folders on "D" drive. I know a bad idea but it happened - then the "C" drive crashed. I used "ImportExportTools" to restore messages from the "D" drive Local Folders and all I got was mozmsgs text data; no attachments.

Is the actual message content & attachments still in the Profile on the old "C" drive? If not where is the beef -errr message content?

BTW-"C" drive is being sent out for restoration. Thank you

Well, the old "C" drive is toast. So I guess all I have left is the mozmsg data?

To back up a bit.

Import/export tools may well have imported your wdseml files. They are EML files after all. But they are not full files as their sole purpose if to allow the silly windows search to search messages. Other than that they are simply wasted space they also apparent do not contain attachments. I do not allow windows search integration. So I simply do not have them.

Thunderbird as you are aware stores messages in MBOX files. What most people miss is the fact that the MBOX file has no file extension. If does however exist as a part of a pair and an MSF file is always paired with it.

So what your looking for is a large file with no extension and a second with the extension MSF that have the same names as your old folders. For example inbox and Inbox.msf are what used to be your inbox.

So first things first. Locate the mbox files.

Then import them with theimport export tool and you should get the whole message including attachments.