I've contacted the volunteers before when my follow-up on a problem wasn't resolved. I haven't had any answers or suggestions since. I don't know what I did to create the problem a couple of weeks ago, while I was trying to change the chronological order of receiving current emails. I wanted the most recent messages at the top with the oldest at the bottom (descending?). The whole system froze; when I rebooted and reopened Thunderbird I discovered that all the folders used for saved messages appeared to be empty. Moreover, every time I read a message in the recent panel it would also "disappear" as soon as I closed it to read another message. One of the volunteers suggested a method to retrieve the lost messages in the folders. I followed his instructions and when I got to the "repair" button, it was grayed out and didn't function, so I'm at a loss. So far as the most recent messages are concerned: very few are displayed in that file. I can only read them now in "All messages". For the first time since I've been a Thunderbird user, I've been forced to go to Gmail through Google and I really miss the Thunderbird platform's features. I hope someone can help sort out my problems.