OOC -- Help Me with Mozilla Mail

[sythyry]

OOC --

We've got a lot of email in Mozilla on one machine, in several accounts, with subfolders. We upgraded Mozilla, and all the accounts went away. This is, of course, unfortunate.

The data is still there -- we looked at the folders, and there are hundreds of megabytes of files. We immediately copied them to another folder, for extra safekeeping.

So ... how do we tell this version of Mozilla to use those mail files?

(Yeah, we hacked around and have a rather chaotic way which seems to let us read old mail and get new mail, but might not work for the subfolders, and seems somewhat likely to break. So please, if you tell us about how to do stuff, let us know how sure you are about it. We've already got a half-assed answer; we'd like a full-assed one.)

Many thanks!

(Yeah, yeah, Back it up early, back it up often. We're more careful with some machines than some others.)

Comments

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Oooh, someone who knows what's going on! Thank you!

[kris-schnee.livejournal.com]

I've done something similar to recover old folders full of messages in Thunderbird, by going into the "Mail" subdirectory of the profile one and copying both a folder like "Inbox" and the .MSF file of the same name. I renamed them to avoid conflicts with existing folders so that eg., "Inbox" became "Unbox." I put these into my new installation of Thunderbird and these old folders showed up, letting me access the messages. I didn't think to copy the whole profile, partly out of ignorance but also because I was trying to bring old messages in without losing the new ones I'd gotten since the hard drive crash.

I don't remember whether the files/folders I copied were in:
Mail\Local Folders
or Mail\mail.xepher.net ,
But I think I copied whichever was larger on the theory that it was up to date. This seemed to work.

[ionotter.livejournal.com]

This certainly does work, but it means that any extentions and themes you had on your previous installation won't work and will need to be reinstalled.

For example:

I have GnuPG and EnigMail on my setup, an open-source encryption and authentication suite, and it's a bloody pain in the neck to get installed the first time. Once it's installed, it's a simple matter of just backing up the files and directory structure, but doing it over again is NOT something I'd like to try.