Re: [FC4] Thunderbird Inbox gone

M. Lewis wrote:

akonstam@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 08:03:10AM -0700, oldman wrote:

Craig White wrote:

On Sat, 2005-09-03 at 23:08 -0500, M. Lewis wrote:

FedoraCore4
T'bird version 1.0.6-1.1.fc4 (20050720)

I've read numerous other postings about mail disappearing. I've searched the FAQ as well as the forum at the Thunderbird help. I've tried all the steps outlined in the 'mail disappearing' topic on the T'bird forum. Still I have no Inbox.

The scenario:

Today I needed to reboot my machine to install a new kernel. T'bird was working fine. I had about 70 or so emails in my inbox. Last night I was working on cleaning the inbox up and moving messages out of there.

Rebooted machine. Brought up T'bird. Went to the inbox folder and it was empty. Shutdown T'bird, started it again. Inbox is still empty.

If I go to my profile/ImapMail/ I cannot find any files or directories called Inbox. It apparently somehow magically was completely deleted.

I've sent messages to myself from other accounts. I can not receive mail now. I suspect the reason is the inbox is gone.

If I click on another folder in T'bird (other than Inbox) then click on Inbox again, I see in the bottom left of the screen "Opening Folder..." but of course nothing happens.

I'm very suspicious of some issue with IMAP, though Dovecot seems to be running fine. I set T'bird to check mail every 1 minute. If I do 'tail -f /var/log/maillog | grep imap' I DO NOT see T'bird logging in every minute. I see it only when I start T'bird.

If I send new message to myself, I can see it in /var/spool/mailboxname.

1) Any clues as to why this happened?
2) Any clues how to recover the messages that were in the Inbox?

3) Any clues how to prevent this from happening again? I suspect the answer to this is have very small Inbox. As I stated earlier, I was working on that last night. Guess I didn't get to it quickly enough.

I posted this on the Thunderbird help forum and I did get some answers

from one fellow. Unfortunately, he was a M$ user and just gave me the

standard spiel about things I had already tried.

Thanks for any ideas about how to proceed.

I don't know how to prevent it happening again. But this is a common
occurrence when using pine for the first time. But to find your mail
should be simple enough if it has not been erased. It has to me
somewhere in your directory, A combination of grep and find will find
the mail file if you look for a word you would expect to see it mail
like: Return-Path

Thanks Aaron. At this point I don't much care about the lost mail. I can't receive NEW mail. And what's really funny is I'm using the same T'bird right now to send this mail from a different account.

I get no new messages on the other account, YET, I can see them coming into /var/spool/mail/mailboxname.

M

Just a thought from my brief usage of T-bird as a mailer.

Jim

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