Missing Thunderbird emails after reinstallation

Somehow, when reinstalling Firefox 3 after a weird error this morning, the colleague in charge of Tech Support for our dept managed to make my Thunderbird email folder disappear.

Here’s the symptoms:

My inbox no longer recognised my current profile, prompting it to request for a new account. The inbox is empty and it looked like a default config. HOWEVER, my old profile was still around, and looking at the mail inbox size of 1 gig, I knew that my emails were there.

Note that this works only if you have one profile name:
a. Make sure Thunderbird is closed.

1. Click on Start > Run > %APPDATA% or open My Computer > C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR USERNAME HERE > Application Data > Thunderbird

2. Open Profiles. The folder you want to keep an eye out is named [gibberish].default . Take note of the name (mine was ic5ghksomethingsomething.default)

3. Go back to the main Thunderbird in your Application Data Folder and double click on the profiles.ini file (note: it’s best to copy the file to desktop before you do anything to the file in your Application data folder)

4. When profiles.ini opens, change:
Path=Profiles/
to
Path=Profiles/ic5ghksomethingsomething.default

5. Pray

6. Restart Thunderbird

7. Profit??

I hope this works for you! It was a mix and match of various sources on the Net.

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