SillyDog701

[Dagmar]

I was sorting my e-mail into folders last night and deleted a ton of e-mail.

I was mostly working on one sub-folder (with lots of its own subfolders) in my inbox.

Today it is totally gone, along with all of the messages in it.

The other folders appear to be in order.

Does anyone have any ideas as to where my folder might be?

Things I have tried:

Looking in my trash - It's not there, as it is emptied whenever I close the program.

Looking in other folders in case I accidentally moved it - Nope.

Looking in my profile on my computer - The folders do not seem to exist. Am I looking in the right place? I see the other folders (the ones currently showing in Thunderbird).

I opened the inbox file (no extension) in notepad, and am trawling through it, looking for some of the disappeared e-mails. It appears some of them are in there, but perhaps not the really old archived items.

Can anyone help me figure out what the heck happened?

Thank you.

Dagmar

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

[iJohnE]

I am sorry but I have no way of explaining this either. I use Thunderbird for my Gmail account and I use a lot of folders also.

I wish you the best of luck with it, though.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

[PaulD]

Can anyone help me figure out what the heck happened?

Just a guess --- At some point you may have Selected the (sub-)folder instead of an email, and clicked on Delete. Then, when you closed TB, everything evaporated.

Consider changing the Account Settings / Server Settings to not "Empty Trash on Exit". And on the Disk Space settings, check the "Don't delete any messages". This does require that one manually do any Compaction and Trash emptying.

It does appear that you are looking in all the correct locations. The only other user recovery would involve file Undelete-ing. I don't know how this is done with NTFS. The only hit I can find on the Microsoft Knowledge Base pertains to Active Directory on a Server; no help. If the lost data are that critical, a professional data recovery service would be needed.

Edit addition: While researching something else, I ran across the Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset download. The Overview offers a faint glimmer of hope on Undelete; I haven't researched it. Requires technical knowledge.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

[sdcup]

Have you tried playing around with the ">" "<" buttons on the folders window in thunderbird. Toggling these buttons presents you with different views of the folders. The way different views are displayed makes it look like the folders that are not in the view may have disappeared.

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)

[Ramona]

Dagmar,

Check out this MozillaZine KB Article, and see if it will help you locate the missing Mail:
Disappearing Mail

And: Undelete a Message

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

[Dagmar]

I have tried everything suggested here and in the articles with no success.

Oh well.

Thanks, all, for the replies.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

[Fulvio]

Looking in my profile on my computer - The folders do not seem to exist. Am I looking in the right place?

Going back to your original post, I get the feeling that no folder is there. Where are you looking for this. Since you are using WinXP, the path is: C:\Documents and Settings\user_name\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles
The profile folders will have a format of xxxxx.name, and are hidden by default.
Also, I am asking which file extention are you seeing matching the Inbox file?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

[kiranpr]

I faced a similar problem and found a part solution. Right-click on the toolbar and select Customize. In the Customize Toolbar dialog there is an item "View". Drag this on to Thunderbird toolbar and close the Customize Toolbar dialog. You can now at least select and navigate to a folder from the toolbar.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12

[Fulvio]

I don't have such an icon, and, besides, it would not help. Once one knows that the folders are hidden by default (there would be no effort to unhide them from My Computer|Tools|Folder options to show all files and folders. Then one can go to the path which I gave, and find what's there. In Mail, if we have a POP account, there are folders, which when open, they show pair of files, like Inbox and Inbox.msf, or further folders of the account, and/or an Inbox.sbd folder, if one uses subfolders. Again, there will be pair of files. If the .msf, the index files, are deleted, with the program closed, they will be rebuilt, correctly, on reopening the program. That's why I was asking for the extention. But, if the file with no extention has 0Kb, only Ramona retrieval suggestion will work.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12