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2 years past messages gone from Tbird - new messages downloading fine - how to get old messages back?

  • 3 replies
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  • Last reply by christ1

dollywalker
dollywalker
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On 9th October all messages from the last 2 years vanished from my T bird inbox. New messages are loading as normal and all the old messages are still on my webmail, how can I get them back into my inbox on my laptop? "Get messages" only downloads new ones. On Tbird they were tagged and flagged and showed whether or not I had answered them - I need that information! Cheers

On 9th October all messages from the last 2 years vanished from my T bird inbox. New messages are loading as normal and all the old messages are still on my webmail, how can I get them back into my inbox on my laptop? "Get messages" only downloads new ones. On Tbird they were tagged and flagged and showed whether or not I had answered them - I need that information! Cheers

All Replies (3)

christ1
christ1
  • Top 25 Contributor
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See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Disappearing_mail

Are you accumulating messages in Inbox?

If you do have a backup of your Thunderbird profile created prior to the incident you can restore the missing messages.

dollywalker
dollywalker Question owner
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I read through the article you referred to and nothing seemed to apply. I searched online again and came across a solution in an old community post, as follows: 

#Empty the Inbox folder in Thunderbird by moving all messages to other folders or deleting them.

Close Thunderbird. Navigate to the profile folder and locate the file popstate.dat. Rename that file to popstatedat.old Restart Thunderbird and it should download all messages in the Gmail Inbox "folder".

This worked fine except I don't have my tags and flags back. I will find out how to create a backup of my profile next time I am working on the computer so if it happens again it will be easier to recover stuff. Thanks for your help.

christ1
christ1
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I will find out how to create a backup of my profile

https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data#w_backing-up-a-profile