Wilgje.net

What to do when Thunderbird decides you have no profile

Loud cries from my mother. It seems my father had broken her email, or so she said. Their ISP doesn’t do IMAP, so it would be quite annoying indeed if they’d lost their email. I am heartily convinced my father wouldn’t even know what button opens Mozilla Thunderbird, for he only knows a Dutch card game called Klaverjassen, I’m too lazy to look up what that is in English. That is why I instantly blamed my mother. However, I was wrong in doing so. After a long time trying to hear her out about what she’d done, I still had no information. Just for the sake of a hunch I looked it up. After googling on “Thunderbird account gone” I clicked on through the first hit to find the answer.

Apparently, Thunderbird has a nasty bug: sometimes, not very often, it simply decides it has no idea the profile default has any info in it. Note: the profile and the email won’t be gone, but the link will just be missing. Changing the profile from default to something else in the Profile Manager seems to prevent it from happening, but since I found out in retrospect, that wasn’t any help. Ultimately I had to perform an ugly ‘hack’: I added a new profile with my mom’s name in the Profile Manager, copied the profile that was missing into the folder of the new profile (default directory for profiles on Windows is Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\ ) and then edited the file prefs.js. The key in that file is, that wherever a link to a directory pops up, you have to set it to the right directory. All other files can remain untouched.

I feel like an excuse for an ugly windows hacker, but at least I got my parents their email back…