Have you just upgraded your Thunderbird email software? To your horror, the first thing you may have seen upon restarting the program is that all your email messages and mail boxes have disappeared. Thunderbird needs to convert its database to the new format.

Some time later the program may have asked for your master password. You don’t remember ever using a master password and you usually typed individual passwords for each of your accounts. Perhaps you used the master password a long time ago and forgot about it. So what now you ask and how can you retrieve the master password?

You can try removing the master password by typing the following command without the quotes into a windows run box “C:\path to thunderbird\thunderbird.exe -chrome chrome://pippki/content/resetpassword.xul”. Click on “Start” then select “Run” and then type in something similar to C:\Program Files\..\thunderbird.exe -chrome chrome://pippki/content/resetpassword.xul. The exact command to type into the “Run” box is the exact path to your thunderbird.exe file on your computer.

Another option is to delete the C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\.default/key3.db file from your thunderbird windows profile, which should prompt you to reset the master password when opening up the program. In the above path “user” is your windows user name that you are currently logged into that has the password issue.

You could also use Windows system restore point. Restore it to a point before you upgraded thunderbird. This time you could go through thunderbird settings to disable the use of a master password and then try upgrading it again without a master password set.