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my oldest and primary email account (an AOL account)

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  • Last reply by christ1

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my oldest and primary email account (an AOL account) is only showing emails from November 2023. Nothing older!! This email account it 20+ years old and i often need to find old emails. I see the number 10,000 Messages next to Inbox . I have way more than 10,000 old messages. This was never an issue that i can recall, until today whats the story???

my oldest and primary email account (an AOL account) is only showing emails from November 2023. Nothing older!! This email account it 20+ years old and i often need to find old emails. I see the number 10,000 Messages next to Inbox . I have way more than 10,000 old messages. This was never an issue that i can recall, until today whats the story???

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Accumulating messages in Inbox is a bad idea. The file grows over time and every time you receive a message the entire Inbox file is scanned by anti-virus software while Thunderbird needs to wait to write to the file. Anti-virus is the most likely to have cause Inbox file corruption which can cause data loss.

These are some generic suggestions to avoid problems with anti-virus software.

Create an exception in your anti-virus software for the Thunderbird profile folder, so that the anti-virus real-time scanner will not scan it. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data#w_how-to-find-your-profile

Don't let your anti-virus software scan incoming and outgoing messages.

Don't let your anti-virus software scan attachments.

Don't let your anti-virus software intercept your secure connection to the server.

Remove any add-ons your anti-virus software may have installed in Thunderbird.

Keep it working. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keep_it_working_-_Thunderbird

And last but not least, backup your Thunderbird profile on a regular basis. https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data#w_backing-up-a-profile

If you do have a backup created prior to the incident that would probably your best bet to restore the lost messages.

To avoid accumulation messages in Inbox in the future take a look at the Archive feature. https://support.mozilla.org/kb/archived-messages

Modified by christ1