I wound up creating an archive of the last 13+ years of emails instead of a backup.

Please explain what exactly you did. What is this archive you're talking of? Is it a zip folder generated using an add-on, or do you simply mean a local folder within Thunderbird to act as an archive/cabinet for your old mails?

Hi Stans, thank you so much for your response! To be honest, I have zero experience with Thunderbird before last night's fun adventure. What I did was select all of the emails in my inbox, then click "Archive". There's no add-on involved. Does that help?

Yes, that helps. Let's check how you've configured Thunderbird's archiving options. Go to Tools > Account Settings > Copies & Folders > Message Archives for the affected account. Is the option "Keep message archives in" enabled? If it is, which folder has been selected for keeping the message archives in? This is the folder where the messages are moved to when you click Archive.

Ok! Yes, "Keep message archives in" is enabled, and it points to my email address.

"Archives" Folder on: <my email address>

That means the messages were moved from the Inbox folder to an IMAP folder named "Archives". On the left menu (folder pane), directly under your account (and not the Local Folders account), do you see a folder named "Archives"? You said nothing shows in the Archive folders. How many archive folders are there? You could post a screenshot of the main Thunderbird window so that we see what you see. Make sure you erase or mask out your email address from that screenshot. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-create-screenshot-my-problem for details.

Yes! I managed to find the saved files earlier somehow by navigating through some obscure method (which I can't seem to duplicate at the moment). It looks like the archive was split into folders for every year of emails. All are empty except the one, which says (3) on the menu but really has 20 emails. I'm sure that makes sense to someone? Here's the screenshot... Thank you again so very much for the help.

The numbers in parentheses (#) show how many unread messages are in that folder, not the total number of messages in it. To see the total number of messages, you need to first enable the Folder pane columns. They are disabled by default. You will find the option under View > Layout > Folder Pane Columns. Next, you will need to add the Totals column. On the left menu (folder pane), just above your email account, you will see the Folder Pane Column. By default, only one column, the Name column, is visible. Right-click on the name column and a menu will appear, then select Total.

If the intention was to move your old emails from the GoDaddy server to your computer (local backup), then you need to create an Archives folder under the Local Folders account. Your current Archives folder is still under your email account, which makes it an IMAP folder and therefore it is also residing in the GoDaddy server and NOT exclusively locally on your PC. Once you've created the local archives folder, move the contents of the IMAP Archives folder to the local Archives folder to store them locally and to remove them from the GoDaddy server. If you don't want to remove the GoDaddy server copies, then don't move them, just copy them to the local archives folder instead. The Archive option performs a move, not a copy, so you need to decide how you want to archive old emails, i.e, do you want to keep both local and server copies, or do you wish to get rid of the server copies and keep local copies only?

See? It DID make sense to somebody! :)

Great info. I now can see the totals!

So far as the original issue goes, yes. I was trying to create a backup. But after the mishap my main concern has switched to hopefully finding a way to "undo" the archive move so I can have all of my emails back where they were. Is that possible???? Because as of now they're not anywhere to be found through an email program. All I can see in my inbox are the emails that have come through since the archive.

Of course, you can simply move them from the yearly archive folders back to the Inbox. Are they not in the archive folders?

I like that your answer sounds promising! However no, there isn't anything in the archive folders except for the one year (2007) that has a handful of emails in it. In case it's noteworthy, I do get a message asking "Do you wish to compact all local and offline folders to save disk space?" when I open it up.

Whatever you do, do NOT compact any folders. Doing so will erase whatever chances you have of recovering those emails.

That was my instinct... glad I listened!

Any suggestions on getting the missing emails back?

Sorry about that, it was getting late over here and I was spent! Yes, there are things we can try to recover them, but first, make a backup copy of your Thunderbird profile. See https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data#w_backing-up-a-profile for details.

I also need you to confirm if the account is an IMAP or POP account. All along I've been thinking of it as an IMAP account, but I just realised you never said it was.

Profile copied. Account is IMAP. And no need to apologize! Thank you for all your help.

If you moved 13 years worth of mails and that involved thousands of email you might have to wait 24 hours before the process completed. For many IMAP serer pressing archive deletes the message from the IMAP server, created it in the archive folder then uploads it again to the server in the new folder (there is no move on some servers) for this Thunderbird uses it's cache. sometime anti virus programs get involved in scanning the cache and things hit the fan. That is why we recommend creating exclusions from anti virus scanning in the Thunderbird profile folder. They cause so much trouble there.

But the key s leave it for an extended period, don't turn it off. don't reboot. just let it think it over.

Weellllll that's the thing. It's been since overnight Sunday-Monday (when the Archiving happened). And there was one reboot, I believe late Monday or Tuesday for a software update. Otherwise it's been open and running since. And I have no antivirus software running (unless it came with OS Catalina).

So how can I get my emails back out of the archive?

Log into your account via webmail and check if the Archive folders were created there as well and if they contain the same messages that you're seeing on Tbird.

Open your Tbird profile folder, then open the ImapMail folder. Inside you will find a folder for your account, open it then you will see a number of small files with msf extensions, and matching mbox files which are larger and have no extension. These mbox files are where Tbird stores your messages. You should see the mbox files for each of your IMAP folders, that is, Inbox, Sent, Archives and so on. Post a screenshot of what you see, showing their sizes.

Next, Quit Thunderbird via the Thunderbird menu. This is very important. Now open the Inbox mbox file using a text editor like TextEdit. Use the Find feature to search for X-mozilla-status. Do you see such entries with values like 0009 next to them? What are the exact values/codes that you see? They will be recurring, for each message that is no longer visible in Inbox on Tbird.

Sorry for the delay, Stans, I had to take a quick trip and got a little behind.

Screenshot showing the Archive folder contents in ImapMail folder.

ImapMail->imap->INBOX X-Mozilla-Status 0001 (X-Mozilla-Statusz: 0000000) (64,832 occurrences)

I also ran the search excluding 0001 and came up with zero occurrences.

Boy do I hope this helps! Thanks again Stans! You're amazing!