Need to recover account information from Thunderbird
by Volker Weber
It's the typical support case for friends and family. You want to help them set up a new computer, but they have kept no records (or out of date ones) of their accounts and passwords. In this case it's a mail account in Thunderbird.
On the Mac you just go to Keychain Access and type in your master password and it will reveal your stored passwords. But what do I do on a Windows machine with a Thunderbird mail client? This seems to be a shady part of the Internet I don't want to navigate. I hope somebody has a good recommendation for a trustworthy way to recover the password.
Can you help?
Comments
Preferences/Privacy/Passwords...
then "Edit Passwords" and "Show Passwords" or something like that
Thunderbird stores application data, folders, settings under the profiles folder, e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Thunderbird
To migrate an account you just copy the folder to the new machine. It also contains the stored passwords.
To reveal the stored passwords in clear test, go into Tools, Options, Privacy, Edit saved passwords and just click on Show passwords.
Cheers,
Sascha.
this works as long as you don't have added a X.509 certificate. by installing such a cert, a master password is set up. No problem if the cert is actually protected with a password. If not:
http://www.thunderbird-mail.de/wiki/FAQ:Thunderbird_verlangt_nach_Master-Passwort%2C_obwohl_keines_vergeben_wurde
I know, I am not helpfull here, but: Avoid to take responsibility for anybody´s computer under all circumstances. Let them do it themselves, otherwise they will never honour your efforts. This is especially true with friends and family.
If you really, really, really have to do it, install a remote access for future use. You will be disinherited anyway, as you are simply the guilty party for everything that goes wrong, plus you will have to explain things over the phone at 4 am (or fill in your most detested time of the day here) for hours without end.
sorry for the offtopic. Anybody ever wondered WHY the BOFH has an evil personality? He used to help friends and family before. Bloody vanity on his part.
offtopic: I recommend UltraVNC with MSRC4Plugin_NoReg and preshared key for the remote access. Works as a charm between my dad's machine and mine.
in cases like this i installed tcpdump and started the packet record before requesting new mail so i could read the password.
does not work with ecure config for sure, but if not give it a try ...
best regards from "downtown"
The password in thunderbird is base64 encoded. Its easy to encode it via a simple script in any language witch can handle bas64 encoded data like python.
filehandle=file(passwordfile)
input=filehandle.read()
re = compile('~\w+=')
rawpassword=re.findall(input)
cryptpassword=rawpassword[0].lstrip('~')
password=base64.decodestring(cryptpassword)
print password
Offtopic continued (seems there is a need of talking about private computer support): Teamviewer works fine for me as a remote access solution (runs on OS X and Windows, free for personal use).
Thank you all. You saved the day.
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