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I remember discovering the hard way that when you delete an email account in Thunderbird and it asks if you want to delete all the files associated with it it actually means do you want to delete the entire directory tree below where the account is stored .... so, as I discovered, saying "yes" when the reason you are deleting the account is because you'd just created it in the wrong place in the the directory tree is not a good idea - instead of just deleting the new account I nuked all the data associated with all our family email accounts!