I've had a similar problem today out of the blue, opened up Thunderbird and it's completely empty of all my emails, account settings, and folders. It has my address book still and some basic settings but that's about it. Is there a way to get it all back without having to fill in all account info again and hope to hell that my colour marked/tagged emails show up again??! This is not good and freaking me out! It's never happened before.

Hi Meljarvis, Perhaps this is a more frequent event than I thought! In my case, most other files were still there, just the main Inboxes were empty. Does Thunderbird have a copy of our files?

Dscarb

Thunderbird is software on YOUR computer. The only copies would be on your providers server if you elected to keep them there or in any backups that you made.

Hi dscarb and Airmail,

In my case, when I opened up Thunderbird like normal it was just all empty, there were no emails or account settings, all it had was the basic program settings that I have set and my address book was still there. I had two email accounts coming into Thunderbird, have been using it for years and this has never happened. I know that all my emails are still in gmail webmail and my isp webmail, I had my accounts set as IMAP, so I know they're not lost, however for the copies to all have disappeared from Thunderbird and even my account folders is very strange. And I'm most nervous that I may have lost all my coloured tags for my emails for the last 10 years! Still waiting for an answer to my own question that I posted separately from this, haven't heard anything yet but really want some advice from someone who might know how to retrieve everything as it was before.

This is similar to my experience.

My inbox is empty, but 460 emails are reported and new mail comes in but it is not visible in the inbox.

Then I discovered that the mail is there, but it's shown as white text on a white background, he headers in the Inbox can't be read.

I thought I had cured the problem, I closed the account and restarted with a new instance of the account. All good, the mail appears, as normal.

BUT, today I found the same problem on another computer I run, on the same email account. So I'm back here. What's the answer?

Seems like many of us have a similar problem, but no one has a solution?

My solution has been to move to Mailbird. (Sadly after many years.) Works a bit differently, not yet a mature product. Of course I have to use Mozilla for my old mail. And I've lost tabbed email, which I used a lot.

Fixing Thunderbird would be a better solution. PS. My wife is not having this problem. (Getting mail from the same ISP.) It only occurs for me with mail from from one ISP. Three other accounts are unaffected.