Matt, Neither the trash file nor the trash.msf file property has been reset to read only.

Matt and/or Toad-Hall, What do either of you think about the concept of exporting my wife's local folders to some holding place and then deleting Thunderbird and starting over? Any tips and cautions I should be aware of ?

Thanks!

Suggest you try creating a new profile using Profile Manager ather than doing a complete uninstall of everything. Exit Thunderbird first. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_manager

Create the mail account and then import the mbox files from old profile into new profile using addon extension 'ImportExportTools'. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/

I'm responding to a response from Toad-Hall, dated 3/11/19 at 1:04 am. For unknown reasons I don't see this response in this thread.

The response said try creating a new profile using Profile Manager rather than doing a complete uninstall. Then create a new account and import the mbox files from the old profile to the new profile using ImportExport Tools.

I've been able to create a new profile but not able to reuse the same email account user name and password for the new profile. I get an error message saying something is wrong with either the user name of PW. I'm thinking I will have to also create a new and temporary email and PW to proceed further.

However, my question now is where in the profile are the mbox files? I don't see anything that says "mbox".

Thanks.

re :I've been able to create a new profile but not able to reuse the same email account user name and password for the new profile.

So you have created a new 'profile name' folder. You have attempted to create a new mail account in that new profile, but have an issue with password/username. This usually means you have a setting that is incorrect. The password and / or username may be wrong. The password and / or username may be correct but not for the server settings you have selected to use.

'username' in most cases is the full email address. 'password' is the same password used to access that email address webmail account via a browser.

you need to make sure you have correctly chosen either the pop or the imap setting. It may well be that by default Thunderbird tried to connect using Imap setting, but you were using Spectrum's POP mail server. The process:

• Menu icon > new Message > Exisiting mail account
• Enter name
• Enter email address
• Enter password
• select checkbox to remember password
• click on 'Continue'
• Thunderbird tries to get configuration settings, but is failing, so is IMAP selected or POP ?
• Click on 'Pop' option to swap or click on 'Manual Config' button and change the settings to POP settings and check the username is correct.

The mbox files are text files. They do not have any extension. They contain emails. The *.msf files are just indexing files used by Thunderbird. Any *.sbd folders mean you created subfolders. These folders may contain mbox files. See first image below which shows example of mbox files in a pop mail account. When using ImportExportTools addon extension, you can import mbox files, but if you have subfolders then you can select to import the mbox file with it's subdirectories. See second image below.

When copying mbox files, do not copy the trash.

Spectrum seems to be showing information for IMAP but not POP - how helpful ! But the server settings should be exactly the same as set up in the original profile name pop mail account.

I'm starting to make some definite progress. Not wishing to jeopardize my wife's emails, I copied her existing profile and added it to my Thunderbird as a second profile. (this is the profile that is causing the no trash problem) I then created a third profile on my computer so I could try transferring from her old profile to her new profile.

The first step before transferring mbox files was to figure out why I couldn't log onto the POP3 Spectrum server. After doing the manual config I noticed the names of the servers were not correct. I fixed them and now logging in is ok.

The good news is that using her new profile, and deleting messages in the inbox, they now show up in trash. Hooray! I have a couple more questions: 1) It appears that I can only import one mbox file at a time. True? 2) Since my wife has tons of local folders with many subfolders what is the best way to transfer them from one profile to the other? Thanks again for sticking with resolving this problem!

You sound like you are not frightened of the file system So,

If the folders are located in local folders. Open the old profile, open the mail folder and copy the "local Folders" folder to the same location in the new profile. Start Thunderbird.

Success!!! Thanks much to both Matt and Todd-Hall for continuing to assist to resolve the problem.