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Windows 8 upgrade lost all my account settings

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  • Last reply by christ1

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I just upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 8 and it deleted my Thunderbird program. SO, I reinstalled it but I've lost all my account settings and e-mail folders.

I stored my e-mail folders in another location, and they're still on my harddisk, but I no longer see an option for controlling where the e-mails are stored in this version of T-bird.

Do I have to manually recreate all my e-mail accounts again? And, after that...how do I get it to read my e-mail folders? I have thousands of e-mails that I must have access to. This is a disaster!

Please help.

Thank you so much!

I just upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 8 and it deleted my Thunderbird program. SO, I reinstalled it but I've lost all my account settings and e-mail folders. I stored my e-mail folders in another location, and they're still on my harddisk, but I no longer see an option for controlling where the e-mails are stored in this version of T-bird. Do I have to manually recreate all my e-mail accounts again? And, after that...how do I get it to read my e-mail folders? I have thousands of e-mails that I must have access to. This is a disaster! Please help. Thank you so much!

All Replies (5)

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Press F10 to see the traditional menu... now select tools menu > account settings. You should be on familiar ground now.

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Thank you for your reply, but I don't think I was clear with the problem. I can find the account settings option. The problem is everything that was there before I installed Windows 8 is gone. I have to manually re-enter all my e-mail accounts, but all of my old e-mails are not showing up. I can get new e-mails (if I re-enter all the account information), but I have thousands of old e-mails and folders that I cannot access.

How do I get those folders back "into" Thunderbird? It doesn't allow me to import anything. I am only given the option to import from Outlook, and I don't even have outlook.

I was storing (at least I THINK I was storing) my e-mail files on a separate partition of my hard disk, and I THINK it's all still there, but there's no way to access those files for some reason on my newly installed Thunderbird.

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I am trying to restore what I think is a backup of my profile based on the instructions I found at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-tb

However, whenever I copy that profile into the C:\Users\MARK\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\ location, and delete the existing profile, it won't let me run Thunderbird at all (says the default file is missing). I actually can't even get to the "AppDATA" folder through windows explorer...I have to find it doing a search for the Thunderbird files.

I'm thinking that maybe if I can get it to use my old profile, maybe that will pull everything together, but I don't know.

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Thunderbird finds the profile through the profiles.ini file. You cannot just copy an existing profile into the profile folder, you'll also adjust profiles.ini.

The easiest way to achieve this is to create a new profile and copy the old one over it.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_profile_folder_-_Thunderbird#Create_a_new_profile_and_copy_the_old_one_over_it