You got everything back how? there is a direct link between your "fixing" your issue and in fact not getting everything back. so lets start by you describing your initial problem and when you did to fix it.

My guess is you lost your profile and simple re entered your account information in a new one to download your mail and folders. But seriously that is just a guess.

I retrieved the active email accounts by using the recovery schemes, such as gmail recovery. But the local folders were not part of that, being stored files. I'm thinking there must be a file on my hard drive where the local folder files are stored. The problem is I don't know the name or extension of that file, where it is, or how I would reinstate it to my email page even if I did manage to find it. So, I'm asking help!

I doubt I can help you as I really do not understand your answer at all. I have no idea what "I retrieved the active email accounts by using the recovery schemes, such as gmail recovery. " means at all.

Sorry for the confusion. Let's back up. I lost my email accounts. I don't know what caused this. I was able to get them back. I have not been able to recover my "Local Folders" and its contents containing stored emails. I am assuming they must be stored in a file somewhere on the hard drive, but what kind of file and where? The recovery of the email accounts themselves is not at issue.

Your initial problem sounds like Thuderbird started up on a new profile as it looked empty and you were probably asked to create a mail account. So, to recover the account, I would have presumed you did this:

• Help > Troubleshooting Information
• under 'Application Basics' near the bottom you clicked on 'about:profiles'
• It showed the new empty profile set as default and the old profile was not set as default.
• You located your old profile and clicked on 'set as default profile'
• Then clicked on 'Launch profile..' which opened the original profile in a new Thunderbird window.
• Then you closed the origina Thunderbird window.

However, if you had followed this normal process, I would have assumed all your 'Local Folders' account information to be displayed.

So, as you did not state the above information - what you did to 'recover' was obviously very different and stating exact process of what you did helps to understand what is going on. re: I retrieved the active email accounts by using the recovery schemes, such as gmail recovery that is obviously not something in Thunderbird and sounds more like either a loss of emails on server which gmail recovered or a gmail account which you could not gain webmail access as forgotten password.

So now, we are in the realm of guessing. I'm trying to explain why it is important to understand what went wrong in the first instance and what 'recovery' you were talking about, because it was not a recovery within Thunderbird.

So, I'm now presuming you are still using a new profile which now contains all the newly added accounts no matter how you recovered them. If they were imap accounts then you obviously just set as new > existing mail account after recovering access to webmail.

Which brings us back to knowing what 'profile name' folders you have in the 'about:profiles' folder.

The 'Local Folders' mail accounts are typically stored here: C:/users/xxx/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles/<profile name>/Mail/Local Folder folder

So is it possible you have two <profile name> folders ? If yes: make a note of the name of the current default 'profile name' folder as this one has the empty 'Local Folders'. Basically, if there are two profiles, you need to copy the 'Local Folders' folder from the original profile and paste it into the profile you are using.

• Exit Thunderbird
• Access: C:/users/xxx/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles/<original old profile name>/Mail folder
• Open the 'Local Folders' folder to see if it contains all your old data, mbox files etc.
• If it is the correct folder with loads of good sized files: Copy the 'Local Folders' folder.

• Access: C:/users/xxx/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles/<NEW profile name>/Mail folder
• move the 'Local Folders' folder to desktop - you can delete later after all is working ok.
• then paste the copied 'Local Folders' into the 'Mail' folder.

Start Thunderbird.