How to Recover Saved Email Passwords from Thunderbird

In this article, you’ll learn where Thunderbird stores your email login passwords, how they are protected, and how you can easily recover them.

Thunderbird Password Secrets

Thunderbird saves all your email login passwords in ‘logins.json’ file at following location

[Windows Vista/7/8/10]
C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\[random name].default\

[Windows XP/2003] 
C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\[random name].default\

Thunderbird stores all the email login details in JSON format in a ‘logins.json’ file

Here is the sample of one of the entry from this file,

{
"id":1,
"hostname":"oauth://accounts.google.com",
"encryptedUsername":"MDIEEPgBBBBABBCEwFAYIbaZIhvcNAwcEaAFsqdqBAiJyHK56O9cid==",
"encryptedPassword":"MDoEEPgBCCCCAABBAAEwFCDIKoZIBAtABCG4rNAexni08zRm4Sraz/",
"encType":1,
"timesUsed":1
},

Here hostname, encryptedUsername and encryptedPassword refers to email server, encrypted username and encrypted password respectively.

Thunderbird uses Triple DES and SHA1 algorithm to encrypt both username & password. After encryption, resulting password is stored in Base64 format in the above file.

Thunderbird Master Password

Thunderbird also allows you to set Master Password to prevent others from stealing your email passwords. If the master password is set then without it email passwords cannot be decrypted.

To make it further secure, Thunderbird encrypts master password using one way hash algorithm. That means it cannot be decrypted instantly and only way to recover it using brute-force method which may take long time based on length and complexity of master password.

Thunderbird stores master password details in files called key4.db and cert9.db in the same profile folder as above. Older version used filenames called key3.db and cert8.db.

How to Recover Thunderbird Email Passwords Automatically

Now you can easily recover all your forgotten mail login passwords from Thunderbird without any technical knowledge.

With just one click, XenArmor Email Password Recovery Pro can recover all your saved Thunderbird email account passwords in seconds.

Follow these simple steps,

1. Download & install the software from here
2. Click on “Recover Passwords”
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