On my Mac, I have a Thunderbird IMAP folder of starred Gmail messages. These are the messages that I want to keep forever. My Thunderbird inbox is set up to auto delete anything beyond 2500 messages, but starred messages are automatically filtered to the starred folder as they come in for safekeeping.
Somehow, a few weeks back, everything in my starred folder got deleted. This comprises messages going back almost 15 years. Fortunately, I have Time Machine backups that I can theoretically use to restore my starred folder.
However, every time I attempt to restore the starred.msf file to Thunderbird, the messages are deleted as soon as I launch Thunderbird and the starred.msf file size goes from 34 MB down to 4K. Somehow, Thunderbird is just wiping out that file when the program is opened.
I was looking online and someone suggested restoring the messages to the local folder to avoid any Gmail IMAP or filtering weirdness, and then manually moving the messages into the IMAP starred folder. So I tried that as well, but once again, when Thunderbird is opened, the restored starred.msf file is once again wiped out - and when clicking on the folder, there are no messages that appear in the message pane.
I've also tried creating a new local folder when Thunderbird is open with a different name, i.e., "starred archive" or something (giving the msf file from Time Machine the same name, of course) and moving the messages there. However, the same thing happens.
Can anyone figure out why Thunderbird is deleting the data in this file? Any suggestions for how to restore my messages?
TB deletes message content after restore from Time Machine
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konocti
- Posts: 2
- Joined: September 11th, 2005, 1:12 am
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tanstaafl
- Moderator
- Posts: 49647
- Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm
Re: TB deletes message content after restore from Time Machi
If you have a IMAP account it stores the messages in remote folders on the mail server. If you enable offline folders in synchronization & storage it will create offline folders on your hard disk that are synched to match the contents of the remote folders, however you will not see the contents of the offline folders unless you are configured to work offline.
Copy "starred." and "starred.msf" into the "Local Folders" accounts local directory. The accounts server settings lists the "local directory" for the account next to a Browse button. That specifies where it stores its files.
That will import the starred mail folder. Or you could use the ImportExportTools NG add-on to import the "starred." mbox file into "Local Folders".
When you restored the starred.* files into the IMAP accounts local directory it tried to synch the remote and offline folders. Since the missing messages don't exist in the remote folder they're deleted in the corresponding offline folder.
Copy "starred." and "starred.msf" into the "Local Folders" accounts local directory. The accounts server settings lists the "local directory" for the account next to a Browse button. That specifies where it stores its files.
That will import the starred mail folder. Or you could use the ImportExportTools NG add-on to import the "starred." mbox file into "Local Folders".
When you restored the starred.* files into the IMAP accounts local directory it tried to synch the remote and offline folders. Since the missing messages don't exist in the remote folder they're deleted in the corresponding offline folder.