Recover from a Thunderbird problem after disk clone

Feb 24, '04 09:51:00AM

Contributed by: glowrocks

After using carbon copy cloner to copy my system to a different disk, I found that thunderbird was no longer working. It started up, but the menus were incomplete and inoperative and needless to say, I couldn't read or send mail. After some trial and error involving the Profiles folder and various files therein, I finally determined that the following sequence restored my previous mail settings with no loss of information:

  1. Rename existing ~/Library/Thunderbird folder
  2. Start thunderbird, cancel out of the account setup process
  3. Quit thunderbird
  4. Make a copy of ~/Library/Thunderbird folder
  5. Copy all of ~/Library/Thunderbird.renamed/Profiles/default to ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/default
  6. Copy ~/Library/Thunderbird.bu/Profiles/default/XUL.mfasl to ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/default
The key is the XUL.mfasl file. It is a binary file, and a cursory examination using strings(1) didn't provide any obvious clues as to the cause of the problem.

Note: substitute your active profile name if not using default.

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