Messages visible but gone

[studnt128]

Dear all, sorry if this has been answered before but all the similar cases did not work for me. I use the Portable version of Thunderbird. I have a lot of messages in a local folder but all of them from April 18th 2016 up to March 16th 2017 are unreadable. I can see them on the list (From, subject, Date/Time, and their size which shows reasonable and probably correct, different values for each message). However, when I try to open each one they look totally empty. I tried to repair the folder (and also to delete the corresponding msf file), in that case they disappear also from the list and only option is to restore from a backup. Restarting in safe mode with add-ons disabled does not help. Exporting the whole folder or the messages with Import/Export Tools neither. Hitting "Reply" shows only a dark cyan ' (the apostrophe symbol), non-selectable, non-erasable, like an image.

Thanks in advance!

[DanRaisch]

You may not be so thankful if my suspicions are correct. It sounds very much as though the "missing" messages were not there when that last back up was made. They may have appeared to be there because the .msf file was not in synch with the message file and was causing Thunderbird to show those messages as present when in fact they were not.

[studnt128]

It is true that my backup was newer than the appearance of the problem, actually I made it just before I started trying to repair the folder. But these mails were not deleted intentionally and were supposed to be there in any case. So, I guess they are gone forever for some reason. Thanks for the reply anyway!

[makaiguy]

This won't help with your current problem but will help prevent future occurrences.

On a regular basis, BACK UP all data that you are not prepared to lose to some sort of storage separate from your regular data storage. This applies to email, documents used in other programs, everything.

We all know this is a good idea and tell ourselves we'll get around to it eventually, but how many of us ever do it? Normally it takes a painful loss of data to make us finally get started.

[studnt128]

The question which arises here is for how long we must keep the backup before replacing with a newer one. I do backup regularly but don't keep a full history, I delete the old ones after some time. Obviously this is a policy I have to reconsider. If the issue is detected immediately, then the loss is minimal or zero. But in such cases is different, only by luck I realized the issue, if I didn't search for a specific message probably I would never pinpoint the corrupted files. My mistake was that I didn't keep an external backup of the messages and attachments, with Import/Export Tools for example, in a more robust file type. But, in general, if a file (of any type) is corrupt and we don't use it for a long time probably one day even our oldest backup would contain the corrupted version. Well, I agree that we can distinguish between "fatal" and "non-fatal" losses and act accordingly.

[DanRaisch]

To avoid this happening again, see the tips in these articles:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keep_it_worki ... derbird%29
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Performance_%28Thunderbird%29