Files and folders in the profile

This article is a supplement to Profile folder - Thunderbird and provides more detail about files in the Thunderbird profile folder.

The profile folder contains many files and folders. Most are described below, but you may see a few strange files which are probably either due to an add-on or this article not being updated yet. However, if you see a directory name of places.sqlite-wal or places.sqlite-shm then you have a bug which causes severe performance problems.

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Contents

 * 1 Files
 * 1.1 Files without specific names
 * 1.2 Files outside the profile folder
 * 2 Other
 * }

Files
None of these files should be read-only. If any are read-only it might be a side effect of having put files on removable media, and then copying them or restoring them back to your profile.

Files without specific names


Files outside the profile folder
You can store messages outside of the profile by changing the &quot;Local directory&quot; in Account Settings -&gt; Server Settings to a directory outside of the profile. If you want to do that you must move the existing files from the old local directory to the new location yourself because the modifying settings only tells Thunderbird where to look for the files. Be careful about changing this location:


 * 1) Some locations can be bad, including those which are dangerous that Thunderbird will automatically prevent.
 * 2) Make sure you backup the directory, because programs designed to back up Thunderbird or mozilla profiles will not backup folders that are outside the profile structure.
 * 3) Think about whether you want to set a folder exclusion for the new location in your anti-virus and anti-malware programs if they normally don't scan your profile.

Other
The layout engine (Gecko) has a Javascript cache, which is not automatically cleared when Thunderbird is restarted. This can prevent a script change from taking effect when you restart Thunderbird. To clear the cache when restarting, add a -purgecaches command line argument.

Profiles