Thunderbird advice

if you go into thunderbird, help, troubleshooting info

look for profile folder and click open folder

if it was a pop3 account, look in the "Mail" subfolder if it was an imap4 account look under the "ImapMail" subfolder

then look for the next level of subfolder down, to have a name related to demon, and have you got large .msf files in there?

or .sbd folders another layer down, wih .msf files within those?

copy the entire profile folder somewhere else before you start fiddling!

Mine's a little more complicated as I have a profile in the usual place but the mail directory is on a data drive that is backed up.

I really do recommend backing up areas like these. Ideally on a drive not co-located with your computer. You can use a program like FreeFileSync to backup and WinMerge to compare directories. They are also useful to see which files change after a catastrophic even like an unintended deletion.

FWIW, just changing the options so that it does not check for mail at startup, or periodically thereafter, would also stop it whinging.

You can just copy the files you want to be accessible into the \mail\Local Folders directory. Say copy the inbox file from the old demon account to there, and call it Demon Inbox or similar.

I do a monthly system backup to a remote hard drive. The last change to this particular data would be May last year. I would like to retain access as it covers legal exchanges during a very protracted house sale!

OK All. Thanks. Now I know the stuff is safe, I may wait for a younger brain to turn up.

In message <$LL48+ snipped-for-privacy@marfordfarm.demon.co.uk>, Tim Lamb snipped-for-privacy@marfordfarm.demon.co.uk> writes

As there was a convenient *system restore* date I decided to go with the Chickens. System now back as was.

So how do I tell Thunderbird to move that dead address to the back of the queue? And move the active one to the top?

Go to account settings (tools menu if you have it enabled, or right click on the email address on the folder pane and choose settings)

Click Server Settings, then untick "Check for new messages at startup", untick "Check for new messages every...", and untick "Automatically download new messages".

One thing you can do is move this message folder into a personal archive folder. It can be 'Local' or some other account folder used for historical stuff.

Once you've done that you can also delete the account whilst retaining the emails.

Under tools/add-ons search for "manually sort folders"

File handling has never been part of my limited competence:-(

OK. John's solution works OK for now.

Thanks

OK Andy. I have gone with John's suggestion which has done the necessary. Thanks.

Magic:-)

Thanks John. All is well.

Yes normally one would copy the messages out to another unrelated folder or place before deletion, as I'm not sure what it does these days, but it used to just delete everything. What I'd like to see in that software is a way to configure hot keys to anything you like so one could emulate say live mail, outlook express or outlook etc, key presses to be able to use it straight out of the box. Many of us keyboard users curse the apparently random choices of hot key sequences used by software. Brian

If you have both accounts "live" in thunderbird, then you can drag and drop messages between mail folders in thunderbird itself in most cases. So creating a folder in your Local Folders section, and dragging the messages you want to keep into that will move them out of the email account into more general message storage.

(Previous solutions at the file system level were only needed when dealing with files that were abandoned on the disk because the account to which they belonged was deleted in thunderbird).

Mine seems to be at E:\Thunderbird\Mail\mail.btinternet.com

And no mention of profile\<Profile ID> ?, but I deliberately put it on E: rather than use the default of chuck everything on the C: drive.

The idea behind the random profile IDs is to hinder anything trying to plunder files from known fixed locations on the PC.