Thunderbird ate my email

Six months of email all gone. I am sick as a parrot. I have found the file in my computer where they are all stored (I hope) but don´t know how to get them back into Thunderbird so I can save the important stuff and delete the rest before moving to another email client. I am so p*****d off.

Googling the problem there seems to be quite a few people experiencing this. The TB knowledge base might be helpful to someone who knows what the hell they are talking about but I have no idea. It does specifically say in the knowledge base that you can restore old email but I am damned if i can find a step-by-step guide to doing this.

I am currently tryng to set up Eudora in the meantime and I hate it already. Any recommendations for another good (free) email client?

 

i would recomend using imap or leaving messages on server side... any email program that stores your mail like that client side can suffer the same thing

 

Okay, I am stuffed. It's all gone and I want to strangle little fluffy kittens about now. But... I did find something that one of the DP'ers might find useful if you ever have the same TB crisis.

You will get a box saying you need to open a new profile. Don't do it! Instead hie thee to this place, aid4email.com and download the trial or bought version. (Trial will deal with the last 50 emails per folder).

Run this nifty programme and save your email folders into a format that can be read by another email client or even by a web browser. Set up a new profile in TB first and you are mincemeat.

Of course, I would love some clever Dp guru to prove me wrong here and help me pin my email folders back together but I think my goose is cooked.

 

Shoemoney's advice about IMAP is very sound. IMAP solves a load of problems related to POP, including being able to access your e-mail archive from multiple computers and locations (as well as webmail when on the road), having it automatically backep up in the server backups, plus having a backup in every e-mail client you use to access the IMAP store (if you have caching on). It's too bad so few people seem to know about IMAP, when it's been widely supported both server and client-side for half a decade already.

PM me, I'll be glad to offer whatever assistance I can.

I've dealt with a number of e-mail problems like this over the years, and know exactly how you feel... I recently helped a friend whose Outlook e-mail client pulled an equally nasty trick on him: until very recent versions, Outlook has serious issues with 2 GB file size limits, so when the mail store's size grew over 2 gigs, guess what: boom! The mail store became irrecoverably corrupted Because this guy's e-mail was absolutely essential to his business, I spent a good part of a week piecing the mail store back together with various tools and a hex editor... got way too familiar with Outlook's .PST file format for my mental health