Thunderbird erased/removed emails and they may be in the trash folder as nsmail.xls files, how do I recover them?
I am missing every email from 2016 on my MAC, I am not sure what happened, maybe I had too many in my inbox, i know that had been a problem in the past. Anyways I have 20 email accounts in my Thunderbird program, most are pop accounts, but the one that is missing the emails is a Imap account so all the emails get downloaded off the server. I happen to see a recovered files folder in my trash, it has about 6 files labeled nsmail.xls, nsmail-1.xls, nsmail-2.xls, etc, they are unable to be opened in excel either. They are only 4kb each, would this be my missing mail compacted? Is my missing email officially toast? How do I go about recovering these files if it is my missing emails.
I have tried the repair inbox option to no success.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thank You!
All Replies (4)
nsmail.tmp are new mails, so I assume that these are extensions from mail you have sent. but how they would appear in Thunderbird I have no idea. These sorts of files are created in the temp folder. Unless you mac does not have that properly defined.
Are you using anti virus? Has it flagged anything recently? mail flagged is usually an indicator of wholesale mail loss as anti virus do not get how to remove a single email.
If the account is IMAP, do the mail appear on the relevant folder on the server? Is the account also monitored through a phone or tablet? often they use POP, Thunderbird usues IMAP and they remove the mail when they download it.
Matt said
nsmail.tmp are new mails, so I assume that these are extensions from mail you have sent. but how they would appear in Thunderbird I have no idea. These sorts of files are created in the temp folder. Unless you mac does not have that properly defined.
That may be the case, I just set it up as per whatever Thunderbird defaults to usually.
Are you using anti virus? Has it flagged anything recently? mail flagged is usually an indicator of wholesale mail loss as anti virus do not get how to remove a single email.
No anti-virus is installed on my computer
If the account is IMAP, do the mail appear on the relevant folder on the server? Is the account also monitored through a phone or tablet? often they use POP, Thunderbird usues IMAP and they remove the mail when they download it.
I have the mail remove3d from the server due to storage issues online. All emails are received directly to my thunderbird and removed online. I am using IMAP for this particular email for that reason, no my gmail emails and yahoo are POP accounts, but those are fine obviously.
If you are using IMAP, that account is synchronized to the mail server. Mail, folders and all.
SO we have a problem. you say the mail is removed from the server. That is not Thunderbird, as it simply can not remove IMAP mail from the server short of deleting it. So how is the mail getting removed?
Matt said
If you are using IMAP, that account is synchronized to the mail server. Mail, folders and all. SO we have a problem. you say the mail is removed from the server. That is not Thunderbird, as it simply can not remove IMAP mail from the server short of deleting it. So how is the mail getting removed?
No I'm sorry I didn't explain it well enough, I have the emails from the server downloaded into the thunderbird inbox, which they are removed from the server when this happens. So now I have them in my Thunderbird inbox, but something that happened a long time ago and a well known problem with the inbox on thunderbird is it will screw up and remove emails when it gets to be too many. I think this has occurred again. I thought I was moving them to separate folders by years, but I may have gotten little lazy on it this past year. Well the emails from 2016 have disappeared from my inbox. I am guessing this has happened again. I tried to repair the inbox folder, but it did not help. Make sense now?