my emails from the last five years have disappeared and trying to receive new emails generates an error message
My antivirus scan secured a FakeAlert threat. Now, all emails from the past five years are no longer visible in my Inbox and are not in the Deleted Items folder. Any time I try to receive a new email I receive the following message:
"There was an error downloading the following message:
From: <sender> Subject: <subject> This message may contain a virus or there is not enough disk space. Skip this message?"
Enter No:
"Unable to write the email to the mailbox. Make sure the file system allows you write privileges, and you have enough disk space to copy the mailbox."
I have write privileges and 184 GB of free disk space. I recently deleted many emails and compacted my inbox. I cannot restore any files that the scan deleted because there are none visible.
I have contacted my antivirus software providers and they concluded that the problem lies with my email software. Can you please help?
All Replies (4)
re My antivirus scan secured a FakeAlert threat. Now, all emails from the past five years are no longer visible in my Inbox and are not in the Deleted Items folder.
That sounds like you have your incoming emails scanned by antivirus. It detected a problem and quarrantined your Inbox. Maybe it even had settings to solve the issue and the Inbox has gone.
Emails are downloaded and written to the Inbox mbox file one after the other in the order downloaded. They are not stored in separate .eml files. Many antivirus products do not seem to be able to differential between different emails in a file. This is something they need to address and is not an issue for Thunderbird. So, when an issue is found in an mbox file, the whole file may be quarrantined. So, it depends on what you set your antivirus product to do with the quarrantined file.
Best advice. Do not scan incoming mail as antivirus product can cause havoc. The antivirus product will still scan any attachment you open. If you do allow scanning make sure the antivirus product asks you what to do if it detects an issue with an email.
As the Inbox gets a whole load of activiity, incoming. moving, deleteing and compacting to remove marked as deleted mail, it is best to use the Inbox as an Inbox only and not as a general store. Create folders to store messages and backup periodically.
re: Unable to write the email to the mailbox. Make sure the file system allows you write privileges, and you have enough disk space to copy the mailbox.
Possible that Inbox is corrupted or has had priviledges altered. Or maybe there is one email sat in the webmail Inbox which cannot be downloaded. First check webmail. Logon to webmail and locate the oldest email that has not been downloaded. Move it to another folder or read and delete. Then try to 'Get Messages' in Thunderbird.
If this gets your mail downloading then all is ok. If still not working check the following.
Make hidden files and folders visible:
In Thunderbird Help > Troubleshooting Information click on 'Show Folder' button
close Thunderbird now - this is important. clickon 'Mail' folder click on mail account name right click on Inbox (not Inbox.msf) and select 'properties' At the bottom - Attributes - the 'Read-Only and the 'Hidden' should not have any check marks. If they do uncheck them and click on OK
Please report back on results.
I changed my antivirus settings as recommended. It seems to have reverted to check incoming emails but now new emails seem to be coming through to Thunderbird OK, so that issue is sorted. Thanks!
As for the existing Inbox emails, the Read-Only and Hidden attributes were already unchecked for the Inbox file, so that isn't the problem. I could view some of the missing older emails through webmail so they're still around somewhere. Unfortunately, webmail deletes inbox emails after 180 days so I can't access all of them that way. Can you suggest any other settings or procedures that could help?
REmove all emails from the Inbox to other folders. When it is empty do the next stage.
If you are using a POP mail account and have some emails in the webmail view that are missing in Thunderbird, you could get everything currently on the server downloaded again.
Make hidden files and folders visible:
In Thunderbird
- Help > Troubleshooting Information
- click on 'Show Folder' button
- close Thunderbird now - this is important.
- clickon 'Mail' folder
- click on mail account name
- Locate and delete these files: Inbox and Inbox.msf
- locate and delete this file: popstate.dat
- close the window - top right X
- restart Thunderbird
A new Inbox will be created. A new popstate.dat file will be created. It keeps a record of everything downloaded, as it is new and empty, TB will believe everything currently in server Inbox needs to be downloaded. This will get everything currently in server Inbox back in Thunderbird. As you already have some emails, you may get some duplicates, but only the once.
I would not expect any emails are recoverable from the Inbox in Thunderbird because they may have been corrupted by either an unknown reason or by the antivirus program doing something with the file to make emails lose information, it is possible that when you compacted the file emails were lost. Compacting removes 'marked as deleted' emails, but if it didi not know where a marked as deleted email ended, good emails could have been removed due to the corruption. In future, compacting should be done on a regular basis, but never compact a file/folder that you think may be corrupted. Getting the error message saying the file may be corrupted was a good hint that somethig was wrong.
Report back on results.
Following these steps I was able to recover some emails, but only going back 16 days. Looks like you were right and the rest are unrecoverable.
Many thanks for your help