It's more work (you'll need to create the accounts again, re-install any extensions/themes you had added, and recreate any customizations you had made) but not as difficult. You can either try to move the profile again, or migrate your data to a new profile per the next section. If you have your personal address book, your settings, and your inbox folders your profile is probably intact. As a minimum you should have a Mail\Local Folders directory with a "inbox." file even if all of your accounts use a global inbox or you only use IMAP accounts.
A 127.0.0.X directory occurs when you use a add-on or extension to support webmail. For example, if you use Gmail there should be a "inbox." file at Mail\. The Mail subdirectory should have subdirectories named after each accounts mail server, each of which has a "inbox." file.
Normally your profile is intact, and it just takes several tries to figure out how to move the profile. Take a moment and confirm that your profile is still intact, and then consider whether it would be quicker to recover the data from the old profile than to keep trying to move it. If you run into problems don't spend too much time trying different ways to move your profile. The tradeoff is that you can't use the profile manager with that profile since it doesn't know it exists. This is the same way you'd run a profile from a USB drive (but you don't need one).
This is not the same thing as windows safe mode.
Use the profile manager to change the name of your profile to a unique name to prevent this problem from occurring again. This will tell Thunderbird again where your profile is stored.Ģ. Follow the instructions on how to move a profile. If Thunderbird didn't run the new account wizard when it started up, see Disappearing mail if some or all of your messages aren't visible in Thunderbird or see Empty folders if some of your folders are empty.ġ. Otherwise, follow the instructions in the Lost profile section. If it looks okay, go to the Corrupt or empty prefs.js section. You'll need to recreate the accounts in Thunderbird unless you have a backup or unless it created a copy with a different name (for example, prefs-1.js).Ī quick way to tell which problem you're suffering from is to look at your personal address book within Thunderbird. In this case you haven't lost any of your mail or address books, but Thunderbird no longer knows how to fetch new mail or send messages, or display the folders in the folder pane. Your prefs.js file has all of your account information and settings. It's just lost track of your profile, which is probably intact.Īnother possibility is that your prefs.js file is empty or corrupt due to either Windows or Thunderbird crashing. When this occurs, you suddenly start up in the new account wizard and it looks like you lost everything. Thunderbird has a nasty habit of once in a great while forgetting about the existence of a profile if it uses the default name.
For Firefox and SeaMonkey, see the article Recovering a missing profile This article was written for Thunderbird.