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Can't view older received emails

  • 3 replies
  • 0 have this problem
  • 9 views
  • Last reply by gp

kenossas
kenossas
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Hi. At my workplace, we use Thunderbird for exchanging emails. Everything was fine until December when the older messages that we received disappeared. We can still view every email SENT by us from when we began to use the app, but we can only view RECEIVED messages from 19 of December. It's quite frustrating as we had a lot of useful info in those messages and now we can't view them at all. I have checked and they are not in any other folder, archive, or trash. We haven't changed anything in the settings beforehand and after. We tried an online version of Thunderbird but the issue still persists. Any idea how can we restore those emails? Thank you

Hi. At my workplace, we use Thunderbird for exchanging emails. Everything was fine until December when the older messages that we received disappeared. We can still view every email SENT by us from when we began to use the app, but we can only view RECEIVED messages from 19 of December. It's quite frustrating as we had a lot of useful info in those messages and now we can't view them at all. I have checked and they are not in any other folder, archive, or trash. We haven't changed anything in the settings beforehand and after. We tried an online version of Thunderbird but the issue still persists. Any idea how can we restore those emails? Thank you

All Replies (3)

christ1
christ1
  • Top 25 Contributor
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I have no idea what happened to your messages, but my best guess would be anti-virus software corrupting Thunderbird mail files and hence causing data loss.

What is your anti-virus software?

Are you accumulating messages in Inbox? What is (or was) the size of your Inbox?

These are some generic suggestions to avoid problems with anti-virus software.

Create an exception in your anti-virus software for the Thunderbird profile folder, so that the anti-virus real-time scanner will not scan it. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data#w_how-to-find-your-profile

Don't let your anti-virus software scan incoming and outgoing messages.

Don't let your anti-virus software scan attachments.

Don't let your anti-virus software intercept your secure connection to the server.

Remove any add-ons your anti-virus software may have installed in Thunderbird.

Keep it working. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keep_it_working_-_Thunderbird

And last but not least, backup your Thunderbird profile on a regular basis. https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data#w_backing-up-a-profile

Any idea how can we restore those emails?

I suppose your best bet would be to restore the missing messages from a backup you created prior to the incident.

kenossas
kenossas Question owner
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We do not have anti-virus software on our laptops, only Windows Defender. Unfortunately none of us made a back up beforehand so there is no way to restore them from files. I checked the files in our Thunderbird profile and SENT messages show up alright, the file has around 332 MB. The INBOX files has 34 MB and has messages only from 19.12. It's weird because I remember having this problem a couple of days before in December, older messages wouldn't show up but we could see them from 7.12. Now we can view the 19.12 messages. I have checked all of the settings and everything seems to be alright. I checked couple of minutes ago and now I can view messages only from 23.12, yesterday I could from 19.12

Modified by kenossas

gp
gp
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Hello kenossas

if you go to account settings, server settings tab, do you have server type set to POP or IMAP ? If it's IMAP, your account could be setup to only show more recent messages (older messages would still be available on the server)