How do you setup a new account?

Old emails in Thunderbird vanish after trying to setup a new account.

• Thunderbird swallowed my emails while I was trying to setup an account for an additional email id. I was/am using TB to access my Yahoo account. Everything was perfect until I tried to add another Yahoo account in TB. The first account was for email id [email protected] and the second one for [email protected] I think the new account has been overwritten on the old one (If I again try to make an account named xyz.xyz, I am told that the account already exists. But the screen shows only one account, xyz_xyz) and all the emails in its Inbox and Sent folders etc. have vanished.) The /Profiles/mail folder shows two folders called localhost (which I think is for the new account ) and localhost-3 (which is for the old account) and seems to contains my emails in files named Inbox, Sent etc. How do I get TB to open the files in localhost-3 and read the emails in it (for account xyz_xyz) into the Inbox/Sent/etc folders? I don't want to just delete the entire account as that would also mean deleting the filters associated with it. And finally I want to get rid of xyz.xyz completely. Any suggestions as to what I should do? Thanks. Thanks

• Answer:

  Close thunderbird. Make a backup of your entire profile. Copy the contents of localhost-3 into localhost (in the live profile, not the backup). Start up thunderbird, see if your mail is there. If so, close thunderbird again, and delete localhost-3. For further reading, see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Disappearing_mail#Part_II (point 4) and http://kb.mozillazine.org/Filters_%28Thunderbird%29#Other_information.