In Thunderbird.

• Help > Troubleshooting Information
• Click on 'Open Folder'

• Exit Thunderbird now - this is important.
• Click on 'Mail' folder

You will see the pop account and also 'Local Folders' account.

• click on 'pop mail account name' folder.

You mention there is a particular folder with .sbd extension which contains emails you want to recover. There will also be an mbox file (no extension), which has the same identical name as that *.sbd folder.

• Copy that mbox file and the *sbd folder of same name

eg: OFFICE and OFFICE.sbd

• Paste them into the 'Mail'\'Local Folders' account.

If there are other mbox files they may also contain emails. Copy and paste them into 'Local Folders' folder. For any .sbd folder you want to recover, you must also copy the mbox file of same name as well as the .sbd folder.

Start Thunderbird.

Upon restarting all the folders and emails will appear under 'Local Folders' mail account. At this point you have a choice. You can leave them in Local Folders as you will still have access to them OR You can highlight batches of emails right click on them and select 'COPY TO' and choose a suitable imap folder. Do it in batches that are not too large as there is a lot of jibber jabber that goes on between Thunderbird and server when doing this process. this will gradually put copies of emails back onto the server, but it will use up server quota, so you would have to weight up the benefits. If you access that server from another computer then you may prefer to see them on the server so you can easily access them.

You do not have to put all emails back on server. You could put copies of more recent emails and leave all the rest as a type of archive in Local Folders.

note: I have always advised you use the 'COPY' and not 'MOVE' because if something goes squiffy then at least you still have the original.

Followed your instructions and got it all back! Wonderful! Thanks so much for your guidance on this.