I suddenly found emails not yet deleted from my imap inbox and from my sent folder had disappeared. I run Thunderbird on a Mac. When I go to Time Machine to restore and go back a few days before the files disappeared I find the profiles. When I restore, for example, Sent and sent.msf the popup box indicates success. When I open Thunderbird and go to the sent folder the emails are listed as hoped for but within about 5 seconds the MAC spinning color wheel pops up, spins for 5 or 10 seconds and then the emails disappear once again. If I open the finder app and scroll to the sent folder finder shows data to be there and when I click on the tab a box opens up with computerese display of the content but not a readable email message. Can anyone tell me where the restored emails age going?

Similarly, when I restore my inbox from Time Machine the popup box indicates success but when I go to inbox the old, undeleted messages are not there. Again, where are they?