I recently rebuilt my wife's laptop using the asus recovery partition. The data drive, "D:", was not touched. After installing thunderbird, I pointed it to the folder where I was storing her email messages, which is "D:\Thunderbird\Debbie imap". The email account is a gmail account, and I use imap to keep the messages on the server. When I told thunderbird to use that folder for her email account, it said that the folder was not usable for her email account. Seems kind of strange, since that folder was used before for the same email account. By the way, the laptop is a windows 7 home premium 64bit machine. Thunderbird is version 52.6 or thereabouts. Anyway, it refused this former email location, so I went through lots of gyrations trying other subfolders within the "D:\Thunderbird\" folder, all to no avail. I finally told thunderbird to store her email in the usual place and created a new identity, or whatever you call it, and everything started to work. Then, I told thunderbird about the local folders, which are in the "Local folders" subfolder of the "D:\Thunderbird" folder. Well, thunderbird shows all the local folders, but refuses to access them. And when I look at the properties for a folder, the location is blank and refuses to take any input from me. I hope this explanation is making sense. I would like to get back to storing the email messages in the "D:\Thunderbird" folder, as that drive has more storage space than the user folder on the C drive. Any help would be appreciated. Also by the way, I have been working with windows computers ever since they came out, and I am pretty familiar with many details of the computer, like files, folders, etc., having delved into it over the years because I wanted to know why the computer does what it does. I have an EE degree, so I know something about the hardware, and I programmed computers using fortran, assembly, and most recently C, so I also know something about that. You can explain things to me in technical language or regular language. The choice is yours. I will understand either way :).