What do you mean by a "passive inbox"?

People often ask how to suspend an account in Thunderbird and to cut to the chase, there isn't a way to temporarily disable an account.

I suspect you imported your accounts and all was fine until the next time you run Thunderbird and it could not find a server to synch to.

If you have a disused account and it has messages in it you want to keep, my recommendation is to move those messages into the Local Folders account.

Hello, thanks for your response.

With "passive inbox" I mean inboxes that are no longer linked to an active email adres. They are just there for archive purposes. Yes all was fine until the next time I ran thunderbird...

To move all emails into one inbox would be confusing (different adresses it would all be a mess, im doing this for somebody who can't handle change so well and is really used to how it is now ) , I rather keep the old messages where they were and this worked out fine by migrating the profile. but then they were gone....

I just like to know why they suddenly disappear.

I observed that the profile folder also shrunk from 5 to 2 GB so the messages are really gone. My hunch is it has something to do with IMAP. or ??? If an account can't connect to a server it shouldn't just get rid of the messages right?

My guess is to migrate again, and disable the checking for new messages at startup for the accounts that are passive. maybe then they stay?

thanks for any advice or comment. s

Hi After migrating it was not possible to keep the profile as it was.

I tried to move messages to the local folder But they disappear when moving!

I disconnected from internet to be sure no server would be involved or such.

but moving the messages to a local folder from the inbox just makes them disappear.

> move to > local folder > acrchiveblabla not in the inbox and not in the folder anymore.

What am I doing wrong? desperate to get this solved.

re :After migrating a profile to a new computer

When you setup Thunderbird first time on new computer, a default profile is created and then TB asks you to create a mail account.

In your case, you do not want to create mail accounts because you want to use the original profile on old computer.

So you would have exited Thunderbird. It is vital to exit Thunderbird before doing anything in the profile folders.

Depending upon what you backed up, you would done of the following:

If you backed up the AppData\Roaming\'Thunderbird' folder, you could just copy the backup 'Thunderbird' folder into the 'Roaming' folder overwriting the default one. C:\Users\<Windows user name>\AppData\Roaming\'Thunderbird'

If you backed up only the 'profile name folder, by default it would be called 'xxxxxxxx.default' where the x's are letters and numbers. Then you would open the backup 'profile name' folder. C:\Users\<Windows user name>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\<Profile name>\ Highlight all its contents - all files and folders right click on highlighted files and folders and select 'Copy'

Then you would access the new default profile name folder which would be in same location but on new computer... C:\Users\<Windows user name>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\<Profile name>\ open 'profile name' folder. Then paste all the copied files and folders into that new default profile name folder overwriting all the default files and folders with all the ones from the backup.

So the new default profile name folder now contains all the old profile name data.

So when you say migrate what exactly did you do?

What type of mail account was used on the old computer? POP or IMAP What type of mail account is used on the new computer? POP or IMAP

If you are copying mbox files into Local Folders in the profile, have you exited Thunderbird first? If Thunderbird is still running then emails will not appear.

If you are saying the old computer and the new one both used IMAP mail accounts and all emails are actually stored on server. Then you would not have needed to migrate emails in imap mail accounts. Instead you would created a new imap mail account and hooked up to the server. Then subscribed to see all the various folders.

If you are trying to copy emails into Local Folders and it is not working, suggest you synchronise folders for offline use, then in offline mode, get copies into suitable folders in the 'Local Folders' mail account. The offline mode will prevent synchronising on folders whilst you are moving a load of emails. If you do not synchronise for offline use, it is possible you are only actually downloading and moving headers and not full emails, so will not be able to read them in Local Folders.