Hi Andy Actually you are a good way towards restoring your email and settings. You have the profile, and you know where it has to go. This article should help https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data Take a look at the short section on "Restoring to a different location" - copy the Contents of the profile you saved to the newly created empty profile that Tbird is using. One caveat - if the current version of Thunderbird is newer than the saved profile was, you may need to tweak further, but try placing the contents of the saved profile into the new profile folder.

Wow, thanks - that's so helpful. I re-named my old profile folder with the current one's name and that worked ... mostly. Two outstanding issues are that some folders of saved emails have corrupted names. But if all the emails are there that's no problem i can work out what they were and re-name them. But more serious is that I seem to have lost ALL my contacts and contact lists, which is a disaster - there must have been 1000+ that I need :(. Any ideas?

First - are you sure TB is seeing your profile contents - if you have IMAP, all the email is seen anyway because it syncs with the online email, but the local info including address book is not accessed. Please check using Profile Manager that TB is opening the profile you think it is using. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-thunderbird-profiles Do you think the TB version changed between your copied profile and the new install? TB has a profile per version, crossing an old profile to a newer TB doesn't work reliably. There could be format changes from one version to another. And I see you renamed your folder instead of copying the contents as instructed. I don't know whether your method works or not. Do make sure TB is entirely closed before working on the profile. If you definitely have TB opening the right profile, your .mab files are in that profile, and you still don't see your contacts, then try searching on this forum for lost address/contacts and see what you find in recent responses - there are various helpful answers about where the contacts file is, and other things that might also be affected in your situation. But first confirm there is only one profile, TB is accessing the right one, and the .mab files are not empty. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1261650

Ah - In my previous answer - "your .mab files are in that profile" should be "abook.sqlite files are in that profile". TBird switched to sqlite format address book - so if your old profile had abook.mab address book but not abook.sqlite and the new version has abook.sqlite, you may need more expert help than mine.

You're spot on. I have abook.mab files from my saved data and two small abook.sqlite files that I imagine were created when I installed TBird again and did a few emails before takling this issue. I will search for a solution - maybe just revert to an olderversion of TBird (they all worked well for me so wouldn't mind doing that if I can find the last version that uses abook.mab ). Thanks so much for taking the time to help me with this.