created folder in Local Folders to hold specific emails. several subfolders, moved emails from inbox to local folder. now folders have to be repaired to open
In Thunderbird....I don't really understand how this email works. Not too long ago, I lost a lot of emails because, I don't really know why. It had something to do with compacting after deleting a message. Boom hundreds of emails disappeared. Even today my settings must be off, because it will delete messages out of the inbox seemingly arbitrarily. But that is just background. I discovered that if I store emails in Local Folders they don't seem to disappear. Today I needed to organized emails according to customers. So I set up a folder under Local Folders and then added numerous sub-folders for these customers. I searched my email accounts (I have two) and picked out the customer's emails. I moved them from the inbox to the sub-folders. That was tedious but I got it done. Now I double click on one of the sub-folders and nothing happens. I right-click and bring up properties. I get a window that shows the name of the sub-folder, its location on the hard drive, number of messages and the "Fallback Character Encoding which is Western (ISO-8859-1). Then there is the box at the bottom that is the Repair Folder box, indicating that something is damaged in the folder index (.msf) So I click on the Repair button and the messages appear. The same thing happens with the next sub-folder. And it happens with the folders in the two accounts that I have...The inbox can only be accesses after it is repaired...
What did I do wrong to deserve this sort of mystery? Any hope of getting it back to normal...? and just being able to access these sub-folders?
This is sort of an emergency as well... I cannot loose this data and I have a deadline of tomorrow to get the reports out of the data.
Any help for me?
All Replies (1)
Personally I think your background and your current issue have the same cause. Your anti virus program. under Thunderbird, all mail in a folder is stored in a single file. this can obviously be very large. To make Thunderbird perform faster an index is maintained with the elements that are used to populate the user interface and message lists.
If your anti virus is overly aggressive in it's on access scanning, your moving mail sees the file tied up for scanning just when Thunderbird tries to open it to build the index. The result a partial or no index. so a repair fixes the issue because not the anti virus scanner is done with the file until you move the next email.
Anti virus programs also scan you mail storage files, identify what they consider a threat and popup teling you they found a bobo would you like them to fix the problem automatically. You click yes, and they delete the file. A week or a month or even a year later you compact your folders. Thunderbird tries, but most of what was in the index is no longer in the file, it was deleted months ago. What is there is the new mail. To you it looks like the compact lost your mail, because Thunderbird did not notice that the file was deleted way back when so it did not update it's index.
Recommended things with anti virus program is to create an exception in the program for the Thunderbird profile folders. Disable the email scanning component (they are hit an miss anyway and ensure the option in 
> Options > Security > anti virus is enabled to allow anti virus program to quarantine individual messages.
What this last option does is make a file in the temp folder for each new email, it allows the anti virus to scan it for issues, just as it would anything on a USB drive you plugged in. Thunderbird then adds the mail to the mail store. If there is a virus the Anti virus quarantines or deleteds the file, thunderbird mumbles about the file being lost or missing and your email scanning is done. What this stops is the anti virus sitting in the middle of the mail download waiting to fail , or react slowly with the result the connection to the mail server gets dropped. It also allows products like Nortons to actually scan mail in SSL secured connections and from IMAP servers. It stops others like alvira requiring you to fundamentally disrupt the security of the whole SSL system so they can scan email or AVG and their silly proxy. Just additional points of failure all.