should there be multilple folders in the profile?

[terrathunderbird]

Hi folks...I've been having trouble confirming the accuracy of backups, and it occurred to me to look up the size of the current "live" profile folders in TB. How do I find these?

So far, this is what I've done:

Local Disk - Users - Computer - App Data - Roaming - Thunderbird - Profiles - terra.default -

And this is where I get stuck.

The choices are many in the terra.default folder:

IMAP
Mail

And within each of these, there are like 20 folders including,imap.compuserve.com, pop.cis.com

In each of these, there is some subset of files that resemble some of my email account folders, Inbox, archives 2010, archives 2009, etc. But the only folders that include the entire list of email account folders the files are "empty" according to MboxFileViewer.

Any ideas?

[terrathunderbird]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Thunderbird

I went here, but still not sure what to do, because when I get to the IMAP and/or Mail folders in the profile there are so many to choose from and they all seem to be missing either a folder or series of folders.

[terrathunderbird]

I see multiple folders with similar names. Here's what I'm looking at:


http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=9aqzx5&s=9

[DanRaisch]

That list suggests that you created (or tried to create) accounts for the same provider in Thunderbird. For instance, the imap-compuserve-1 folder would represent a second compuserve account added after the initial imap-compuserve was added or attempted to be added.

By the way, that image hosting site tinypic might not be the best choice. Viewing the image results in advertising appearing alongside and over your image and trying to use the back button leads to advertising images as well. You might look at another option like Imgur.

[tanstaafl]

Either you have multiple accounts with the same email provider and/or the local directory used by several accounts has changed on its own. It's not clear why the latter occurs, though there is speculation it might have something to do with problems when compacting. However, since you are using IMAP accounts it doesn't cause any harm than other than wasting network bandwidth downloading fresh copies of any offline folders you might have.

A "local directory" is the directory tree used by an account to store mail (offline folders in IMAPs case) and message filters. If you have multiple accounts with the same email provider (same mail server) Thunderbird adds a numeric suffix to the directory name.

[terrathunderbird]

I definitely do NOT have multiple accounts with Compuserve.

I definitely DO have multiple gmail accounts. However, my backups from 2017 did not have ANY gmail accounts.

Oddly, I have NO yahoo accounts, and never did, but somehow there's a folder for yahoo appearing.

[terrathunderbird]

To Dany's comment... I used TinyPic, because it was reference in this page about how to post an image: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Posting_a_scr ... _the_forum

Will try Imgur. Thanks for the suggestion!

I didn't create or try to create any new folders in the profile. So I'm baffled as to why there are so many folders. Did you see the one with all of the pop folders? there are 10 now...

[tanstaafl]

I updated the KB article to omit tinypic.

[terrathunderbird]

Thanks!

So I shouldn't worry about their being multiple folders in the profile Mail or IMAP folders? If not, excellent, I'll stop worrying about it. But I would like to know which folder is the "live" folder that TB is actually updating, so I can match that to the backup to see that it's being backed up adequately.

Sorry for all the questions...but getting an answer to this would be very helpful. I'm currently just looking at the file update date in the "properties" section of the folder/file. Oddly, this seems to not always be "today's" date for what seems like the "live" files. It might be yesterday and a few of them are from 2014.