Recover thunderbird emails from dead Win7 HD?

[treehouse]

Hi guys, my Windows 7, which I was using on my other laptop (had to, honest!) has just gone AWOL - won't boot beyond saying that it's Starting Windows, so I'm guessing a boot sector corruption or something. Won't repair and I've no media or recovery disk.

I've hoiked the drive out and plugged it into this, my lovely Linux Mint machine, as a USB drive to recover data I failed to back up. I've got several months of emails and attachments in Thunderbird on that old machine, and I'm just wondering if there's a fairly simple way to copy them over.

I think I've found the relevant data in

Code: Select all

/media/john/WINDOWS/Users/John/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles/qbbrju5y.default/Mail/pop.tiscali.co.uk

which has an 'Inbox', 'Sent', 'Drafts' and 'Trash' mailbox files, along with a .msf file for each with the same name, of type "C source code", plus a 'msgFilterRules.dat' and 'popstate.dat' file.

Ideally, if I could merge these (in fact, just the Inbox and Sent emails) with the Inbox here in Linux, that would be great, or is there any other way to just peek at them or use them as another profile? I'd rather not mess too much in case I break something, since there's nothing absolutely critical in there - it would just give me a more complete picture of stuff over the last few months that are missing. I switched to the Win7 machine for some work I had to do. I've got all my contacts on here that matter.

Thanks
John

[odtech]

Hi guys, my Windows 7, which I was using on my other laptop (had to, honest!) has just gone AWOL - won't boot beyond saying that it's Starting Windows, so I'm guessing a boot sector corruption or something. Won't repair and I've no media or recovery disk.

I've hoiked the drive out and plugged it into this, my lovely Linux Mint machine, as a USB drive to recover data I failed to back up. I've got several months of emails and attachments in Thunderbird on that old machine, and I'm just wondering if there's a fairly simple way to copy them over.

I think I've found the relevant data in

Code: Select all

/media/john/WINDOWS/Users/John/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles/qbbrju5y.default/Mail/pop.tiscali.co.uk

which has an 'Inbox', 'Sent', 'Drafts' and 'Trash' mailbox files, along with a .msf file for each with the same name, of type "C source code", plus a 'msgFilterRules.dat' and 'popstate.dat' file.

Ideally, if I could merge these (in fact, just the Inbox and Sent emails) with the Inbox here in Linux, that would be great, or is there any other way to just peek at them or use them as another profile? I'd rather not mess too much in case I break something, since there's nothing absolutely critical in there - it would just give me a more complete picture of stuff over the last few months that are missing. I switched to the Win7 machine for some work I had to do. I've got all my contacts on here that matter.

Thanks
John

Hi.

There sure is.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunde ... porttools/
Install above addon in TB.
Click on a root folder where you want the imported folders to be sent to then go through the following menus.
Under Tools you will find a Importexporttool menu.
Import MBOX files.
Select a directory where searching thembox files to import (also in subdirectories)
Now point it a the path you posted above

I don't know of an easy way to merge contacts but you could use TB's built-in tool to export your current linux contacts then replace it with the Windows 7 contact and afterwards just import the linux ones again to end up with a merged contact list.
The file you need to copy is abook.mab in the TB root folder. Just make sure to backup both before you start or you might end up loosing contacts.

[treehouse]

Thanks odtech, I'll try that! I don't need the contacts. I never got round to exporting them from this address book to the Win7 machine.

[coffee412]

I heard this is possible but have not tried it yet:

Go into your home directory on windows to apps or roaming where the thunderbird folder is at. Zip it up and on your linux box make a new user account. Move the zipped file to the new user account home folder and unzip it. Then rename the thunderbird folder to .thunderbird (adding the period). Then fire up thunderbird as the new user and it is suppose to work. Not that this really applies to your situation but its a thought.

coffee

[treehouse]

Thanks coffee412. That might work too. I've solved it with a sort of mix. I installed the ImportExportTool addon. As I did this, I noticed there was already a menu item "Import..." in thunderbird by default, but I thought the extension would be useful to export as well for backing up purposes. Also, running it didn't seem to show any results to choose to import.

The addon has several options for importing, including emails, but none of them seemed to get anything from the Win7 profile I had copied to the local drive. I first used it to backup the current profile. I then tried importing the profile, pointing it to the profile folder, and it imported that to the .thunderbird folder. The dialog allowed me to open the profile manager or just close the dialog. I just closed it, being a bit over-cautious and knowing I must be able to run the profile manager later.

I looked for other options, like whether the default import menu item might find anything, but it still doesn't.

However, I then tried to find the profile manager and couldn't, so did some more research and found out why - you have to exit Thunderbird, then run "thunderbird -ProfileManager" from a terminal. This showed the imported profile alongside "default", and it loaded fine so I could read the emails from the last few months copied from my Win7 machine's dead drive. Brilliant!

In Profile Manager, you can opt to choose the profile each time Thunderbird starts (just from a shortcut) or set the chosen profile to automatically load, so you'll not see the PM. For the time it takes to choose a profile, I'll just leave it, so I can easily check older emails if I need to.I guess I might be able to import emails from one profile to another now they're in the default folder, but I probably won't mess about with it more now. It means the profile has been reduced in size anyway.

Thanks!