Mozilla Thunderbird mail recovery

Well well well.

For one year I've used (and I'm using) Mozilla thunderbird. But my last upgrade (I'm using Debian), my Thgunderbird don't start correctly... no, it isn't correct: Thunderbird is working, but in my KDE desktop don't handleits window correctly (swap control widgets, hide, show, maximaze and set fullscreen the windows). This strange (!) behavior make my Thunderbird unusable (but it works! I can see the status bar while it download my emails).

To resolve the problem, I tried to move the user directory (.mozilla-thunderbird) into .mozilla-thunderbird.precious. Then, I've started againThunderbird. It goes well (stable window, not hiding part of it)!!!! :?

The problem is: now thunderbird has no settings, no account and no email (contained in .mozilla-thunderbird.precious directory).

How I can recover them? I've tried to copy only a part of it, but it doesn't work!

Anyone can help me?

Have you tried uninstalling this new version, re-installing the old version and exporting your mail as text or csv or something open and common (that's if it can still be read), then repeating the upgrade and importing the mail into the new one?

Make sure you write out a copy of that .mozilla-thunderbird.precious directory to a cd-rw or something semi-permanent before you start.

Well... this solution is quite hard: first I don't remember the previous version of thunderbird (I don't update very frequently), and second I don't know how to specify to apt what version to install (! however, not knowing the version to install...)...

I thought to overwrite only the mail data (in Mail subdir), maybe this works...

...if I will have my mail client ok, i will freeze this version, so the next update won't update it! :cry:

If you're using apt, then there may be an apt-update log entry for the last time Thunderbird was updated, that'll tell you what version you had. If not, you can always try the one that came on the install disk with your distro.

You wouldn't normally use apt to get an earlier version of a package release; if you needed a specific version, then a trip to your distro's web site or a google search is normally needed to locate previous versions. If you have a lot of email or contacts you wanted to keep, then it's certainly worth a try before you settle on a new mail client and lose all your old data.

It's done! :D It worked: I created manually an user account. Then i roughly copied (with a cp -r) the Mail subdir of my precious data. And thunderbird hs found all my emails!!!

Understanding the cause of this strange behaviour should be great, but maybe it's only an isolate case...

Sadly I lost all my account rules... but don't matter. In future I'll backup all my emails!!! :mrgreen: