I could go into great length about folder sub folders MSF files sdb folder and a great deal more.

Lets just say if you do not know you probably do not need to. Just install the import export tools addon and import the MBOX files from your old profile folder. It has an option to recursively import all MBOX files in a structure and rebuilds the folders as it goes. Probably a better end result, even if you will have them all in a sub folder one level down from their original location. But you can move them after they import.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/

Thanks Matt, but it's too late for that. I tried to drag and drop the folders and files and got them all messed up. Now I can't figure out how to arrange in the proper order. I need to know what goes where.

Jim T

Not pretty.

The essential files are.

MBOX files. these appear in the collected files without a file extension. SO you will see a file inbox and it will be accompanied by a file inbox.msf for example with the prior file being the MBOX file with the mail in it.

You will also probably see folders with an SDB extension.

So in the file system you might see

inbox
inbox.msf
inbox.sdb

The first is the actual mail. The second is an index into the mail and not required. (Thunderbird will simply regenerate it if it is missing.) The last will only exist if you had sub folder of inbox. That folder will contain the MBOX files of mail that were in those sub folders of inbox.

You might also have wdseml files and mozmegs folders. They are junk created so windows search can search mail. They are not of any use to Thunderbird really.

When I finally disabled the windows search (I use Thunderbird to search my mail) in options and manually deleted the data they created I removed some 100,000 files from my profile.

Having said all that, if you dropped your old local folders into your new local folder, you would either replace a lot of things or created a sub folder in which things should appear as they did only one level down. SO perhaps you might want to expand on " got them all messed up" so I do not lead you off down the garden path to a bigger disaster.

Thank you Mark. I think this is exactly what I need. If I understand correctly the structure should look like this:

Profiles

  Profile name
     Mail
        Local Folders
           Travel (as an example)
                Travel
                Travel.msf
                Travel.sdb (if there is a subfolder)

Is this correct? Thanks for your help in this.

Jim T

I think it would look more like this:

Profiles
 Profile name 
  Mail
   Local Folders
    Travel
    Travel.msf
    Travel.sdb (if there is a subfolder)

Thunderbird doesn't need and wouldn't use a folder (your first "Travel") to organize the Travel part of your email folder tree.

Travel.sbd would be a filesystem folder for any subfolders contained within the Travel email folder.