Progress and regression.
I found another way of accessing the list of profiles: Following Legimet's
suggestion at the start, I proceeded to the list of available profiles,
picked one, and then invoked it so as to get the Home Icedove Mail/News page.
Clicking on the 3-bars icon in the Home Icedove Mail/News page, I chose "open
saved message" which gave me a list of recently accessed files. Navigating
from there to my .icedove folder, I could then see my five desired profiles,
plus a new presumably blank default profile folder. Three of the five
profiles can be seen to contain accessible information and a fourth is blank,
but the fifth, my main profile, appears in an incomplete form by this method
of access.
Fortunately I had the forethought to save a copy of my 12GB main profile to a
thumb drive.
If I click on "all files" in "open saved message" I can see the profile.ini
and profiles.ini file, the latter which contains this text:
> [Profile0]
> Name=default
> IsRelative=1
> Path=ft16fssu.default
The Path statement points to the latest, but presumably empty, new default
folder.
At one stage I had laboriously created a list of profiles in the Program
Manager popup, but I had to delete that because of accidentally creating two
entries with the same profile name, but I presume that by starting over, I
can recognize the pattern that icedove follows so as to create a profiles.ini
file of my own. However, I have no hope that icedove will accept that, as it
won't even allow me to rename the profiles.ini file and later revert back to
the original name.
What I am search for is a way of generating in the profiles.ini file a list
of the actual, real, historically useful profiles that I want to access as
needed and which will afford me a choice of which version to use when
starting icedove.
