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Lolu chungechunge lwabekwa kunqolobane. Uyacelwa ubuze umbuzo omusha uma udinga usizo.

Thunderbird deleted all my emails

  • 3 uphendule
  • 1 inale nkinga
  • 7 views
  • Igcine ukuphendulwa ngu Matt

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How can we help? good question. I have a suggestion, dont set peoples email accounts to delete emails after 120 days.

Thanks to the retention policy setting being set by im not sure who (I would not consciously set this setting as I have been backing my emails up for years)

Years of emails have been deleted without my knowledge (until now) thanks to this setting. I dont know how it was set, whether it was during an update or something but because of this I have lost years of emails, numerous purchase receipts, customer information and conversations, attachments, etc ALL GONE AND DELETED

I have spent years backing up emails to then have one setting wipe them all out without my knowledge or approval. As my back ups overwrite the previous one and I was not aware this setting was set, my backups have been wiped out as well.

Thanks a lot mozilla.

You have no idea how insanely angry I am right now.

How can we help? good question. I have a suggestion, dont set peoples email accounts to delete emails after 120 days. Thanks to the retention policy setting being set by im not sure who (I would not consciously set this setting as I have been backing my emails up for years) Years of emails have been deleted without my knowledge (until now) thanks to this setting. I dont know how it was set, whether it was during an update or something but because of this I have lost years of emails, numerous purchase receipts, customer information and conversations, attachments, etc ALL GONE AND DELETED I have spent years backing up emails to then have one setting wipe them all out without my knowledge or approval. As my back ups overwrite the previous one and I was not aware this setting was set, my backups have been wiped out as well. Thanks a lot mozilla. You have no idea how insanely angry I am right now.

All Replies (3)

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I would guess it is set by your mail provider. Thunderbird would default to 7 days for POP accounts, not 120 and it has basically no defaults for IMAP.

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It should default to not delete emails at all, as people are not aware and are having their emails deleted without any warning, I only realised what was happening when searching for emails i knew existed but were not coming up in search results, it was not until i manually scrolled down looking for them that I realised most of my emails have been deleted.

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You are entitled to whatever view you like. The reality is POP is from a time when a 25mb mail store was huge and keeping mail on the server was not really an option for anyone. Those defaults have been there for like 25 years. Since Netscape first played with a mail client.

If you are suggesting that people do not understand mail, something that is so ubiquitous in their lives I agree. But there are still service providers that offer 5mb mailboxes. A terrible shock for those expecting their mail to be deleted on download (the original defaults) instead their account is full and new mail bounces.

Thunderbird defaults to IMAP, and IMAP does not delete anything. While I sympathise with your point, I simply do not agree the expected result for POP is do not delete anything. ALthough that default was finally arived at in V3 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=531088

There has been plenty of discussion on the subject https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=231541

But this discussion brings us no closer to determining what happened in your case. Personally I would like to know