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My upgrade from 20.04.06 to 24.04.1 was a disaster - the installer hung and I was forced to interrupt it which corrupted my 20.04 kernel. I was forced to do a fresh install of 24.04.1 and then try to put all my files back manually afterwards (I have backups of my precious files on other disks).

Once I had my shiny new 24.04 running I installed the snap version of Thunderbird from the App Center and then set about putting my previous thunderbird emails back (dating back to the 1990s) - but although it starts up and successfully pulls new emails down from my ISP's IMAP server, it does not find my old folder structure at all. This means I can see new emails, but nothing older than a couple of days. Like I said, I have thousands of mails I want to access from over the years.

I tried two ways:

  1. importing my old mail directory via the Import tool

  2. pointing the profiles.ini at my old mail directory

Both fail to find my folders.

This is worrying as I have always been able to get thunderbird to see my mail directories before during previous bumpy upgrades over the years.

I am aware that thunderbird on 20.04 was installed via apt and via snap on 24.04 and have worked out where the profile directories are on both.

I note that if I try to view my Settings > Server Settings I see this instead:

XML Parsing Error: undefined entity Location: chrome://messenger/content/am-server.xhtml Line Number 171, Column 21: <menuitem --------------------^

I could really use some help please.

Thanks, Chris

Chris Bamford
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1 Answers1

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I have the same error on the server settings for all my email addresses. Nonetheless my emails are working fine, in and out.

So I think this is a TB-wide error rather than something wrong with your own setup. Refer to TB forum reports on this. There is a proposed fix here and it is to be consolidated into the 128.3.2 version.

TB Server Settings Error

I am assuming that you are using the snap version of TB. apt uses a version of TB that is several versions older than the currently issued one.

So the profiles folder should be in

/home/your-username/snap/thunderbird/common/.thunderbird/

and be named something like rxcjkbf1.default or some such long alphanumeric string followed by .default . . .

So you'll have to replace any installation-created xxxxxxx.default folder with the one extracted from your old TB data, e.g. yyyyyyyy.default .

Then you go to the profiles.ini config file alongside the yyyyyyyyyyy.default folder in /home/your-username/snap/thunderbird/common/.thunderbird/ and edit it so that

Path=yyyyyyyyy.default

then save and exit.

It might be safer to reboot the system before reopening TBird to check if it's "seeing" your folder structure and old emails.

Here's hopin' . . .

It's possible that the emails from the apt TB on 20.04 may be incompatible with the newer TB version on snap.

In that case, I would be inclined to - temporarily, at least - uninstall the snap version of TB and then install the apt version - which is likely the one you were using on your 20.04 system. Try the routine described above with respect to injecting the old email data. If successful then update the TB version to the newest available from apt.

Trunk
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