Thunderbird emails gone after Win7 Crash

Thunderbird seems to have been wiped clean after a crash in Win7 Prox64. During booting, it went through and chekced the files on the hard drive for errors and I guess it found some corrupted files (but the names displayed were random letters and numbers). When i got back to my destop and launched Thunderbird, all setting were gone and I could not see my previous emails. I found this which explains where the emails should be found. Unfortunately there is no Mail folder.

I do have a backup of emails from a month ago using MozBackup. But of course the most recent emails are the most important. Are they gone for good?

One note, the MozBackup file was made on another computer in Win XP. Is there any chance that XP used a different folder for storing emails? Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place? Any other ideas?

 

That link must be old, Win7 has a slightly different path.

So now that I've found my emails, how do I "hookup" Thunderbird to them? Currently Thunderbird looks as if it was freshly installed with absolutely no settings. How do I get it see my old emails and settings?

 

This is from memory but I think it covers most of the steps. Go to the control panel and select folder options. The folder option window will pop up. Select the view tab. Select show hidden files, folders, and drives. Click apply and close the window. Now open the computer icon and go to the users folder. Select the folder with the id of your computer, and open that. You will see a folder that used to be hidden labeled AppData. Open that folder. Select the Roaming folder and open that.

From there, select the Thunderbird folder. Open that folder. You should see a folder that is labeled Profile. Open that folder. You should see a folder with a label similar to 8sieldlk.default and today's date. Make note of that folder name. Go back one level up to the Thunderbird folder. You should see a configuration setting file called Profiles. Open that. Edit the file, replacing the current profile name with the folder name you wrote down. Save the changes and close all the folders. When you restart Thunderbird, you should see all your emails like before. If not, or if there is only one xxxxxx.default folder, then you lost all your old emails since the old profile was corrupt. But I doubt that would happen.

You could also do a restore to a previous saved point within Windows and that usually brings things back too. Good luck.

 

Thanks, the first solution did not work b/c the file already had the correct file name (so I guess it must have been corrupted during the crash). I reverted to my last restore point (yesterday afternoon) and it is fine now. Thanks for your help!