Looking through files......confused

bluenose1940

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I have spent some time this afternoon going through a lot of my data with the idea of deleting what I no longer need.

There is quite a lot that I have got rid of but, I have noticed that quite a lot of my stuff seems to have changed. I use Microsoft office for my word processing and spreadsheets but I have noticed that I have an amazing amount of stuff that has the extension 'Thunderbird Document. Now I have never used this and worse, I have never even heard of it. On top of all that, I can't open any of the files.

I wonder if anyone can throw any light on this for me please.

Many thanks.
 
If it's what I have in mind and of the back of my head, those are Mozilla's email client's Thunderbird files (played with Linux before). I think other email clients use the same file format too.


Ever used email clients other than MS Outlook or other OS's than Windows? If either, that's it.
 
Hello Smart_Guy, I have only ever used Windows, currently running Windows 10 pro and my email is an @gmail.com

As I mentioned in my first post I have never even heard of Thunderbird let alone used it and so I am totally confused as to how so many of my files now have that extension.

It wouldn't be so bad if I could find out how to open them to see what they are. Any ideas as to what I would need to download to do this?
 
Thunderbird is a mail client.
It is free, so you could download and install it to find out, (though it is also likely that it just shares the same extension if that is a program you've never had.)
 
I use Thunderbird as my mail client. The only extension that is assigned as a Thunderbird Document on my machine is the extension .eml. I did a search on my computer and didn't find ANY documents with an extension of .eml. I believe that is only used if you save an email as a separate document on your PC.

The first thing I would do is to go into File Explorer and on the "View" tab, put a check mark in the box labeled "File name extensions". Then look at those files that show as Thunderbird documents and find out what the actual extension is. I believe somehow Thunderbird has incorrectly been assigned as the default app for the wrong extension. You will then need to determine the correct app for that extension and then assign the correct app as the default app for opening that extension.
 
I mean the email client Thunderbird, not just "Thunderbird" as a stand alone word. It comes by default for free with some OS's like Linux Ubuntu which could make one come across its file format by chance and forgot about it. Currently you are using Win10 but maybe you used some Linux distro in the past so I asked.


If non of the above applies, and apparently non does, those files might be accidentally using the same extension letters as that of Thunderbird emails. So they could be something completely different than that. Happens all the time.


I remember some app that identifies files and their formats. Not by extension but by analyzing the file itself. Just found this:Downloads (the app is Identify!) and tested it myself with a zip file of which I removed the extension. It successfully identified it as a zip file.


I also found that Thunderbird uses some kinda universal email format with .eml extension and guess what, sources say MS Outlook can run it too. It is possible you used MS Outlook before too, among maybe other email clients as well, that use the same format.


Email client = an application you run (MS Outlook in Windows 10 for example) that manages emails instead of having to use a browser to access your email thru services like Gmail and Hotmail ;)
 
Hi again Smart_Guy, thank you for your input again. I'm still confused though. I do recognise most of the files by their title, it's the fact that the type/extension appears to have changed that's baffling me. I wouldn't have intentionally created any files with that particular software/extension. However, some time ago I did use Microsoft Outlook so perhaps that is the basis of the problem.

Thank you too for the input from strollin and root. The help and guidance from members of this forum is always very much appreciated, especially by this 79 year old wrinkley:confused:
 
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