Passwords/accounts don’t work after migrating Thunderbird profile from Linux to Windows

Passwords/accounts don’t work after migrating Thunderbird profile from Linux to Windows

The thing I love about Thunderbird (and its sibling Firefox) is that to transfer a wholly configured instance from one computer to another (or one operating system to another) all one needs is to copy over the profile folder (in fact just its contents as profile names are automatically generated).

However, on the path of a Linux to Windows migration I discovered the oddity that Thunderbird will neither connect to mail server not prompt for password, but will just sit with a Connected to mail.server.tld in the status bar. Opening the debug console will display several errors, including something like:

Error: [Exception... "Initialization failed' Initialization failed' when calling method: [nsILoginManagerStorage::init]" nsresult: "0x8057001e (NS_ERROR_XPC_JS_THREW_STRING)" location: "JS frame :: resource://gre/components/nsLoginManager.js :: LoginManager.prototype._storage :: line 98" data: no]
Source File: resource://gre/components/nsLoginManager.js Line: 98

To get out of this lock-up, delete/rename the following files from your profile folder:

  • signons.sqlite
  • signons.txt
  • cert8.db
  • key8.db

This will lose all your saved passwords, so make sure you know them or can reset them before doing this.

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