My emails, folders, address book are gone. Help!

[dilberts_left_nut]

My complaint is that when I asked apt to install thunderbird on my new stretch installation (on /dev/sdd6) the installer complied, but it also reached out and messed with my icedove email program on /dev/sdd5. It created a new folder called kovaoodr.default. There is no ImapMail sub-folder under kovaoodr.default.

Based on what you have claimed previously in this thread, that is impossible.

It's a problem of your own making, that you have avoided providing any evidence for, that could help us help you.

Please. Tell me how to get reconnected with au82l5l7.default.

Edit profiles.ini

[Ellen1910]

Ellen1910 wrote:
I used /dev/sda as my home directory -- mounted on /home in jessie-gnome (/dev/sdd6). It still retains my old /home directory. Now, that volume is unlinked which I guess explains why it doesn't appear


Ellen1910 wrote:
It didn't matter which desktop I happened to be on; I had the same info to hand.

How?
That doesn't happen by magic, you had to set that up.

It may not have been magic, but I didn't set it up -- not within my competence to do.

I installed jessie-gnome and icedove (sdd6) first. Sometime later I installed jessie-lxde and icedove (sdd5). From then on, the two mail programs appeared to be mirror images of each other. Icedove on jessie-gnome (sdd6) and icedove on jessie-lxde (sdd5) always had the identically named mail folders -- au82l5l7.default. And here they are today. [/mnt/LXDE is the old /home folder on jessie-gnome; /home/ellen is on jessie-lxde]

Code: Select all

 ls -l /mnt/LXDE/oldhiddenfiles/.icedove
total 12
drwx------ 10 ellen ellen 4096 Oct 31 13:03 au82l5l7.default
drwx------  4 ellen ellen 4096 Oct 11 18:25 Crash Reports
-rw-r--r--  1 ellen ellen   94 Jul  8  2015 profiles.ini
ellen@topos:~$ ls -l /home/ellen/.icedove
total 16
drwx------ 10 ellen ellen 4096 Nov 12 05:38 au82l5l7.default
drwx------  4 ellen ellen 4096 Nov 13 14:05 Crash Reports
drwx------  6 ellen ellen 4096 Nov 13 16:16 kovaoodr.default
-rw-r--r--  1 ellen ellen  104 Nov 12 19:09 profiles.ini

[Ellen1910]

My complaint is that when I asked apt to install thunderbird on my new stretch installation (on /dev/sdd6) the installer complied, but it also reached out and messed with my icedove email program on /dev/sdd5. It created a new folder called kovaoodr.default. There is no ImapMail sub-folder under kovaoodr.default.

Based on what you have claimed previously in this thread, that is impossible.

It's a problem of your own making, that you have avoided providing any evidence for, that could help us help you.

Please. Tell me how to get reconnected with au82l5l7.default.

Edit profiles.ini

So -- you tell me. How did the new folder <kovaoodr.default> get created and wind up in jessie-lxde's icedove profile.

BTW -- thanks for the "Edit profiles.ini" heads up. Much appreciated. I simply substituted au82l5l7 for kovaoodr in the Path entry in profiles.ini, and I've got everything back.

[dilberts_left_nut]

Sorry, I have no interest in playing "guess what I did, but didn't tell you about".
Good luck.

[tynman]

If you check out articles about migrating Thunderbird to a new computer, such as https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mo ... w-computer , I think it you will see it is fairly straightforward to fix your problem. (If I am understanding the problem correctly - this thread is pretty long.)

You haven't moved to a new computer, but the concept is the same.

The gist of the process is to copy all of the contents of the "old" Thunderbird profile directory into the "new" profile directory that was created by the new installation of Thunderbird. In one of your (OP's) posts, you mentioned

~$ ls -l /home/ellen/.icedove/au82l5l7.default

That's the "old" Thunderbird profile directory, the contents of which need to be copied.