Why can't thunderbird find my email accounts

Question

I open up Thunderbird and it asks me if I want to create an account. I have two existing accounts that access my mail on Time Warner Cable's Webmail. One is PAWilkey and the other is Tx7Phyl. I had 100's of emails in these two accounts. Thunderbird seems to have lost both of them. I am sure that the emails are still on my harddrive but Thunderbird can't seem to find them. Also, Thunderbird only shows the Write Chat Address Book tabs on the bar. All the other items are greyed out. Anybody have any idea how I can get access to my accounts and emails again? I am currently on 31.1.0 of Thunderbird. I had been on 17.0.5 when I first saw the problem. I allowed Thunderbird to update itself in the hopes that it would be able to locate my accounts. No luck there.

Answer 1

I am sorry to hear about this. Here is what I would suggest you do in the interest of getting access to your email back rapidly.
I'd suggest [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-tb#w_backing-up-a-profile making a backup of your profile], then trying to revert to a previous Thunderbird version.
In Windows Thunderbird updates are automatic by default. To avoid similar situations in the future, you could change that and decide to have a more conservative approach to upgrades.
You can uninstall the current Thunderbird version via '''Control Panel > Programs and Features''' and reinstall a previous version, download it from here:
* [http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/31.0/ Version 31.0]
* [http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/24.8.0/ Version 24.8]
Click on the type for your OS. eg: If using Windows select 'win32' then select the language eg: en-GB = English british then download the .exe file
You can [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/configuration-options-updates?esab=a&s=automatic+updates&r=1&as=s customize automatic updates behavior], however, it's under '''Tools > Options > Advanced > Update'''.
My suggestion would be to set it to '''Check for updates, but let me choose whether to install them.''', specially if you depend on email for critical / important business or personal matters.