Is there an overview of the file structure of TB?

[truebluepup]

In December of 2016 I had a dying Win7 laptop. I used a PCMOVER utility to migrate all my programs and data files to a new Win10 machine. Many of the programs that seemed to survive the migration did not work at all afterwards and had to be re-installed. Thunderbird started on the new machine, but could not find any of my local folders (and could only show me one item in the INBOX. I mucked around on the Internet reading portions of other peoples problems and the solutions to them and came to realize that TB is a set of files whose contents name other files and so on, and if I could find/recover/recreate the proper Profile file or profile.ini file I might be able to recover the several years worth of emails that were probably still safely tucked away in some local files on the hard drive. I did some diddling and at one point had (and still have) lots of what appear to be TB structural files (migrated from the old computer and newly created by TB on the new computer) appearing in the TB UI where I would expect my local folders to be displayed. It is clear that I copied or renamed the wrong things. Yesterday I downloaded and re-installed the current version of TB (Build 50-something, I think), but it still fails.

I think if there was a "Thunderbird for Dummies" guide somewhere describing the file structure of TB and how TB uses its files to store new and filed email, I might be able to slog through it and get back access to all my email.

At present I am getting an error when TB starts up and tries to read mail from the POP server. The error box says:
Error with account {accountname@ispdomainname}
The RETR command did not succeed. Error retrieving a message. Mail server {mailservername.com} responded: no such message.

Can someone point me to a description of how TB uses it various files to find and display my email ... alternatively I would be quite happy to hire someone locally (Kissimmee/Orlando area) with Thunderbird expertise to do the fixing for me. (If that's you, please post a response here.)

Thanks,

Bruce

[DanRaisch]

The file profiles.ini does contain information that Thunderbird uses to locate the profile. See this article to reconnect with the transferred data
-- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Recovering_a_ ... isappeared

See this article for basic information -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Getting_start ... hunderbird

[truebluepup]

Thanks! There's an awful lot of reading (technical reading!) there, and I appreciate the pointers to it. My old email is important to me so I'm going to give this a go. Don't be surprised if I'm back next week with specific questions. Thanks, again!

[DanRaisch]

You're welcome, and good luck.

[tanstaafl]

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Running_from_ ... hunderbird for a command line argument to specify the profiles location, that lets you temporarily bypass the need for Thunderbird to use profiles.ini to find the profile. That can be useful as it will let you verify the profile is okay before trying to deal with any issues with the profiles.ini file.

[truebluepup]

Just wanted to thank all previous respondents for the advice and the links to pertinent material. It took awhile to do it but I was able to recover the profile from way back in August of 20016 ... the day Thunderbird stopped working for me because of corrupted e-mail in my in-box at the server. ALL my lost folders and their content 'came back' ... they were never really gone but there was no way to access them. After recovering my long lost saved messages (about 4000 of them), set about trying to rid the inbox of the corrupted message. It was a difficult process, BUT with some excellent help from the ISP technical support folks I was able to save the content of the inbox (except the corrupted message itself), delete the inbox, create a new inbox, repopulate the inbox with the messages (about 300 of them) that I saved (at the beginning of this sentence), and restart Thunderbird ... which dutifully read them up from the server's inbox and allowed me lovely Thunderbird access to my e-mail once agai!

Thank, everybody, very much!!

[DanRaisch]

Glad to hear you were successful.