On my Mac powerbook laptop I have several accounts set up. One administrator, one personal and one for work. When I got my laptop I set up my work email on my personal account. Not a bad thing, but I now what to move my thunderbird email over to my work account.
I did a google search and found the mozilla page with several methods for moving the profile over.
I did method two and edited the prefs.js file, but that didn’t seem to work; the program crashed whenever I tried opening an email. Reading the troubleshooting section, I then started thunderbird in safemore, and that worked.
So, it would seem that deleting the chrome and extensions folder would fix the problem, but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to keep the extensions if possible. In step two they said to edit the prefs.fs and change the old profile to the new profile. That got me to thinking maybe the old profile was still lurking in another file.
I did a grep -r and it found the “Binary file secmod.db”. Normally you don’t want to touch binary files, but since I had a backup elsewhere I decided to edit it. I changed the old profile string to the new. There was only one occurrence and the size of the profile strings was the same. I saved the file and started thunderbird normally (not in safemode)
It worked, I could read email again and I didn’t have to delete and reinstall my extensions.