can't restore Thunderbird from backup

[Chris Aitken]

I'm trying to restore my Thunderbird mail file from backup.

I've done this in the past successfully several times. It's not working
this time.

I didn't take note of what version of Thunderbird was running before my
latest hard drive crash. Maybe 2.

The Thunderbird that installed with sudo apt-get install thunderbird is
3.1.7

I tried installing an older version with sudo apt-get install
thunderbird-2* and it rudely went ahead and installed Thunderbird 3
again - only this time it took a half hour instead of a few minutes.

I notice my saved mail has folders with .sbd extension but the new
version saves folders with .msf extension.

I would like to do two things:

1. Restore my old mail if possible, and
2. backup my mail properly for next time.

chris at shiny-desktop:~$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS \n \l

Any ideas?

Chris
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