How to recover lost email accounts in Thunderbird

This is how to handle situation when Thunderbird wants to do set up from scratch after it crashed. First locate profile folder - you can do that in Thunderbird by using Help -> More troubleshooting information. Once you locate this folder looks for prefs.js and possibly prefs-1.js, prefs-2.js etc.

• Turn off Thunderbird
• Backup old prefs.js (just in case this doesn't work)
• Find the most recent of these prefs-*.js files (most recent in sense of modification time)
• Copy most recent prefs-*.js into prefs.js
• Start Thunderbird - if everything went well you should have all your email accounts again