How to fix a corrupted Thunderbird Profile
From Provider Wiki
Introduction
These instructions were culled from a MacNet posting of June 29th. The LSP discovered the following problem:
"A couple of days ago, when I tried to open Thunderbird, all my mail had disappeared and the "create a new profile menu" popped up. It took two hours to fix the problem. I just want to report on what worked. At least it worked in my case, which was due to a corrupted prefs.js file.
First of all, don't create a new profile using the menu that pops up with the just-opened Thunderbird. Also, don't try most of the suggestions found on the Mozilla home pages. Most of them did not work for me."
Instructions
- Close Thunderbird
- Open the Profile manager via a Terminal, using the command: /Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird -profilemanager
- If the above command doesn't work, try again, but include -bin as shown in this example for Thunderbird: /Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin -profilemanager
- Then, create a brand-new profile. Be sure your give it a new name. Make sure it communicates with your mail server by opening Thunderbird.
- Close Thunderbird and follow the instructions from: [[1]]
- To do this you will need to look for the old and new profiles in: /Users/user-name/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles, where "user-name" is replaced by your user name.
- Be sure to move profile contents one at a time and test Thunderbird each time. Also, be sure to close Thunderbird after each trial.
Final Notes
Don't move the prefs.js from the old profile to the new profile, as this is what caused the problem initially.
Credit to this solution goes to Peter Hahn of SEAS.
