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Last night Thunderbird deleted all my sent e mails, and can they be recovered?

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nancy63
nancy63

Last night Thunderbird deleted all my sent e mails. I had 7000 items in my sent mailbox. This morning they all were gone, except for things sent since 10:00 pm last night. Our server provider said they were deleted by Thunderbird.

Does anyone know why this happened and can they be recovered.?

We do a back up on an external drive. Can we go back two days and get them reloaded?

Is there a way to prevent this happening in the future?

I am using an old PC running Windows 7...yes, I know we are beyond support.

Thanks, Nancy

Last night Thunderbird deleted all my sent e mails. I had 7000 items in my sent mailbox. This morning they all were gone, except for things sent since 10:00 pm last night. Our server provider said they were deleted by Thunderbird. Does anyone know why this happened and can they be recovered.? We do a back up on an external drive. Can we go back two days and get them reloaded? Is there a way to prevent this happening in the future? I am using an old PC running Windows 7...yes, I know we are beyond support. Thanks, Nancy

All Replies (1)

Lin
Lin
  • Top 25 Contributor

Is this a POP3 account or IMAP? If IMAP (I don't have a working POP3 account to compare)...

Thunderbird has some settings that can control message retention. See (in Thunderbird for Windows) <Tools | Account Settings | Synchronization & Storage | Disk Space>. If you have it to, Thunderbird may automatically delete messages older than x number of days. There could also be similar settings set by your email provider, not controllable by Thunderbird.

If you have a backup, it might be possible to recover an older copy of the Sent mailbox. Older versions of Thunderbird are not as flexible in this regard as new ones. Try to recover to a safe location the most recent copy of your entire Thunderbird Profile from your backup and we can take it from there.

Buza umbuzo

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