Opened Thunderbird Portable at work this morning, per usual, and was asked by Thunderbird if I wanted to create a new e-mail account. I did not, as I was perfectly happy with the 4 I already have. Or, had, as all of my accounts have disappeared. They were most certainly there yesterday! I cannot see anything wrong with the profile folder, and I ran a CHKDSK on the drive and no errors were reported.
Is there anything I can do get my accounts to once again show up in TBP, with all of the e-mails that were there yesterday. I'm talking about something other than a "restore your backup" solution, which would mean losing several days of e-mails and calendar entries. I'm also talking about something that I can do now, as opposed to this evening when I'm back home where my back-ups reside.
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If you have a semi-recent backup, grab the prefs.js file from it and move it to your ThunderbirdPortable\Data\profile folder. Make a safe copy of the prefs.js that's already there. Most likely, this config file got corrupted, which will cause the behavior you are seeing. It happens occasionally with Thunderbird, even with local installs. The app may also have backups of prefs.js it made itself in that folder you can rename since Thunderbird itself is designed to detect and recover from this happening. This is just the config file that defines your accounts and such. It doesn't contain any email or calendar entries.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thank you John, that did the trick. You say this sometimes happens with local installs; do you mean non-Portable Thunderbird?
Yes, it happens with regular Thunderbird installed locally on occasion as well.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
John, I just realized that all of my message filters are gone. Any way to get them back?
I think you can do the same procedure with msgFilterRules.dat from a semi-recent backup.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thanks John, I was able to restore the msgFilterRules.dat file and return my message filters. Sorry for the lateness of my update.