11/14/2023 0 Comments Profile folder thunderbird portableAs it stands, the error produced by the lost of prefs.js will guide a user to a potentially catastrophic solution - the loss of ALL email data - needlessly should he/she try to recover on his/her own and recreate the email account(s) information from scratch via the built in account wizard or GUI of Thunderbird. Nor are many of them going to be able to find a guru to help them. And remember USERS ARE NOT COMPUTER SCIENTISTS! They expect programs to be designed in a far more robust fashion and NOT have to become a debug expert in computer software technologies. (In particular recent changes/additions done since the last backup was preformed) A program which does not take its own steps to protect its critical data is treating its users in an extremely callous fashion. General backups/restore operations are desperate "last ditch" emergency procedures and often leads to massive data loss regardless of how well/often done. Sometimes my fellow programmers sure can make me mad when such immature mistakes are made and can so easily be avoided!Īnd finally, telling users that they should be making backups of everything, so a restore can be done later is wrongheaded. THIS IS SLOPPY PROGRAMMING and SLOPPY DESIGN of the software and should be fixed ASAP! This is such an easy design pattern to implement, many many many programs do it all the time and any decent programmer can implement a far more robust algorithm. If the file is not valid or missing then look for a backup and automatically restore it. Thunderbird should verify the validity of such files on open, and the success or failure of the previous close. Thunderbird should back up the file BEFORE it opens it for modification, writes to it, verify and persist a flag to disk to indicate a successful close occurred when finished. Thunderbird SHOULD back up automatically and restore if needed, critical resource files such as this one. THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR SUCH A POOR SOFTWARE DESIGN that allows such a critical resource file, like prefs.js, to be lost so easily! PERIOD! I see a number of people in this thread are having this problem. Fortunately I had it backed up so was able to restore once I determined the problem.Īs a long time professional programmer (30+years, Computer Scientist) I am going to voice a strong criticism about the design of Thunderbird, some of the help/answers seen here, and perhaps take the trouble to find out where and how to submit this as a bug report. I also just lost prefs.js and suddenly Thunderbird went flat, with no accounts and it acted like it was wanting to start from scratch.
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