Hi Geoff Are you talking about a gmail account ? Did you subscribe to see the 'All Mail' folder ? That 'All Mail' folder was renamed by the developers to 'Archives', so in reality it is the 'All Mail' folder but it displays as 'Archives' Gmail stores everything in the 'All Mail' folder. Gmail realises that is not convenient - in fact it's rather useless. So they invented something called 'labels'. Labels is like a type of tag which gets applied to emails, thus allowing a type of virtual view of emails in whatever 'Label' is applied. Thunderbird has no concept of 'Labels' because it's purely a gmail thing. So imap Inbox, Sent etc is set up as a separate folder and they synchronise with same label names on server and download a copy of whatever is on server. When you choose to 'archive' an email - gmail just removes the label meaning, it does not display inany folder with the exception of 'All Mail'. So ineffect 'All Mail' is where gmail stores archived emails. I do not subscribe to see 'All Mail' because it's just a duplicate of everything, all incoming, outgoing etc. If you delete anything from the 'All Mail' folder then you are deleting it off the server and that means that email will not display in any gmail label. It has gone. Imap accounts can only show what is on server in the relevant label for folder. That means if email does not exist in 'All Mail' - it does not exist on server, so will not display in eg: Inbox. If any Anti-Virus messed with it, I stand a high risk of data loss. If I accidentally deleted emails from the 'All Mail' folder, I will lose those emails out of other folders leading to data loss. It's much safer to not subscribe to see it in the first place. ''re :Just deleted all the files in my archive folder'' Why ? ''re :I don't want an Archive Folder.'' But is it an 'Archive' folder in reality ? Right click on the 'Archives' folder and select 'Properties' In 'Location:' does it says something like this: imap://your name%40gmail.com@imap.gmail.com/All Mail If you do not want to see the 'All Mail' - aka 'Archives' folder, you need to unsubscribe from seeing it. You cannot delete a server folder and in the case of 'All Mail' you should never do anything with it. To unsubscribe: In Folder Pane right click on the gmail account name folder and select 'Subscribe' Uncheck the 'All Mail' and click on'Ok' Do you have any backups ?