how do I recover lost messages
A client is using Thunderbird 52.3.0 and came from lunch to find that all but 4 messages in her "Local-In" box have no message content. After backing up the entire profile I tried "repair folder" and when than didn't work I restored the profile and tried "compact" folder and both of those options cure the situation by deleting all of the data in the index list so that all traces that the message ever existed are gone.
I remember this problem from over 9 years ago - and many people on the forums that had never lost a message claimed that the user was hallucinating. later other people claimed it was the user's own fault for not moving and organizing their messages every 8 minutes ... but in this case it wasn't the user's default "IN" box where new messages go ... but a local-in where she moved things specifically in hopes of not losing things. Irony. Oddly, any message that was in a SUB folder to this "local-in" box seems to have survived intact.
Since this problem goes back almost a decade, I was wondering if anyone every fixed the problem or developed a stand alone recovery utility?
All Replies (4)
See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Disappearing_mail
The most common problem for data loss is anti-virus software corrupting Thunderbird mail files. Accumulating messages in Inbox is contributing to the problem.
It is therefore recommended to keep the Inbox as tidy as possible, and exclude the Thunderbird profile folder from being scanned by the anti-virus real-time scanner. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Thunderbird
If the messages cannot be recovered, restore them from a recent backup.
Modified by christ1
OK - I hear where you'e coming from and I can see that "in theory" but here is the problem:
The Symantec antivirus scan that would scan the entire system runs at 2am and this happened over the lunch hour... and the box that was affected was NOT the INBOX. It was a folder she created over a year ago to save emails that she did want to save... so this folder (named localInbox) had nothing added or deleted from it, so it seems unlikely that the "active" part of the antivirus would have accessed this file.
Ironically the reason she created that folder and keeps her INBOX so bare is because we ran into this problem years ago, where TB would spontaneously loose half the INBOX. Our most famous case was a brand new (back then) Windows 8 system -- JUST installed the TB client and downloaded her first 6 messages ever on this PC, took a phone call, came back and 4 messages were gone. Same symptom, too: index exists, so we know the messages were there at one time but the message body no longer existed. The fact that the SUBFOLDERS in the "localInbox" and the message inside them are intact tells me that the file structure itself is intact, just that the messages are gone.
But I imported the profile to my Linux system this morning and used VI and OD to view the file and it has simply been emptied.
I hate Outlook with the passion of a burining supernova (the star not the computer) but for all it's problems this isn't one. {sigh}
Thanks anyway, Christ
This is about the anti-virus real-time scanner, not the on-demand scanner. It will access the mail file every time a message gets moved there or is deleted, unless there is an exception.
so when I open TB and navigate to my "old" folder ... a folder that has been scanned every night at 2am for the last 8 years .... and I scroll down the index and highlight a message from early 2016 and the preview pane is suddenly blank -- that's because a new email came into another box?
no sale.