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Thunderbird deleted all my folders

  • 2 replies
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  • Last reply by Chris_in_NB
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Chris_in_NB
Chris_in_NB

I have been using Thunderbird for 3 or more years.

I use it to 'collect' several POP, GMail and Yahoo accounts in one place.

It is an excellent tool because - it gives me offline access to my email - it offers some privacy & protection because my yahoo/gmail credentials are no longer known to the browser - if for any reason I lost access to yahoo/gmail accounts, I would still have the archive of sent & received email

Today, however, Yahoo had a server outage of some sort, and Thunderbird seemed to have gotten 'half connected', and could not find my inbox, and then proceeded to wipe out my many GB of local stored email folders.

The messages I saw were "Looking for folders", and then "error creating folder" ...

I do not know if offline storage is a vital feature for other users, but I would certainly like to have more protection against the sort of thing that happened to me today.

(Thanks for all your hard work)

Chris

I have been using Thunderbird for 3 or more years. I use it to 'collect' several POP, GMail and Yahoo accounts in one place. It is an excellent tool because - it gives me offline access to my email - it offers some privacy & protection because my yahoo/gmail credentials are no longer known to the browser - if for any reason I lost access to yahoo/gmail accounts, I would still have the archive of sent & received email Today, however, Yahoo had a server outage of some sort, and Thunderbird seemed to have gotten 'half connected', and could not find my inbox, and then proceeded to wipe out my many GB of local stored email folders. The messages I saw were "Looking for folders", and then "error creating folder" ... I do not know if offline storage is a vital feature for other users, but I would certainly like to have more protection against the sort of thing that happened to me today. (Thanks for all your hard work) Chris

All Replies (2)

christ1
christ1
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From your description of the problem it sounds like your Yahoo account is IMAP. Can you confirm this? If so, did you have synchronization enabled?

I would certainly like to have more protection against the sort of thing that happened to me today.

Many people believe that managing all mail on the server serves as a backup for their email archive. But that's not true, as you found out the hard way. The only real protection is to enable synchronization for IMAP accounts, and create backups of the Thunderbird profile folder on a regular basis.

Chris_in_NB
Chris_in_NB Question owner

Yes, I am connecting to Yahoo using IMAP, and "Message Synchronizing" is enabled.

Yahoo is running again, Thunderbird is now connected again, and is in the process of downloading (again) many years worth of email...

thanks, chris