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TRiG
Asked: 2024-09-15 03:40:29 +0800 CST

Can I import only the live accounts from old Thunderbird?

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I upgraded Ubuntu, and my Thunderbird has lost all its mail accounts. (I had one profile, but multiple mail accounts within it.) Some searches reveal that the new Snap version of Thunderbird stores its settings in a different location. I could perhaps copy the old directory to there to see whether it would work, but on looking at the current directory, there are ImapMail directories for a whole bunch of old mail accounts which no longer exist, and I think perhaps it would be neater to start from scratch. Can I easily extract just the actual mail accounts (account names and login details) from the old place, and put them in the new directory so that it syncs the IMAP emails again?

Incidentally, this appears to be a bug in the upgrade process. Old mail accounts should not be lost in an Ubuntu upgrade. Should I report that somewhere, or is it already known?

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1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I found a python script which can extract account information (including passwords) from a Thunderbird profile directory, and used that to recreate only the live accounts in the new Thunderbird.

    To quote mivk at Super User,

    To retrieve the stored passwords from your Thunderbird profile, you can use this Python script. It needs the logins.json and the key3.db or key4.db files from the profile directory.

    This will list you the passwords from your TB profile:

    python firepwd.py -d ~/.thunderbird/$Name_Of_Your_Profile_Dir/

    (It also works for Firefox passwords.)

    This gives me a new, clean Thunderbird setup, without the old dead IMAP files. (It did not retrieve the RSS feed I had in Thunderbird, but there was just the one and it was easy for me to set it up again.)

    This doesn’t explain what went wrong in the first place, of course, but the outcome tidies things up.

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