IMAP account removing messages from server

[Yamaha32088]

tldr; Emails disappearing from IMAP server but never moved or deleted, not using POP. Emails still appear in INBOX file under ImapMail directory but don't appear in the accounts mailbox.


I have a very odd issue happening with a single account in Thunderbird. Recently (April 26th) I migrated several of my email accounts from a cPanel environment to Rackspace cloud using their automated system. All of my emails were transferred successfully and I setup my email accounts on all my devices roughly 4 of them using IMAP making sure to never use POP.

I noticed after a couple weeks a few emails were missing from the inbox but I brushed it off as possibly having a filter active I couldn't figure out how to turn off. Yesterday I noticed that my inbox is only showing recent emails roughly from May 22nd, 2017 until today. I figured that it was because of a tricky filter in Thunderbird so I opened up Outlook and discovered that Thunderbird and Outlook have matching Inboxes, I decided to login to the webmail interface and discovered that the webmail, Thunderbird and Outlook all match! Panic started to set in and so I browsed through all the folders and called Rackspace, they combed through their logs and show no deletions, or POP logins.

I run a dual boot system Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04, I use Outlook on Windows and Thunderbird on Ubuntu. Something I noticed odd was that while in Outlook I saw emails from several months ago but when I booted into Ubuntu and opened up Thunderbird I only had emails from May 22nd and forward. Once I went and looked at Outlook and webmail again they only had emails from May 22nd and forward as well. I have narrowed the issue down to something in Thunderbird but I don't know what.

I think it may be related to a corrupted file or something because I can look inside ~/.thunderbird/xxxxxxx.default/ImapMail/example.com/INBOX-1 and see all the emails I am missing. I downloaded the plugin ImportExportTools and created a local folder and was able to import the INBOX file and see all of the emails I am missing as well. Something that looks odd when I browse the `ImapMail/example.com` directory is that there is a few files that appear to be duplicates or copies (INBOX.sbd, INBOX.msf, INBOX-1.sbd, INBOX-1.msf, INBOX-1)

Anyone have an idea what could cause this behavior? It seems like it could be a setting but I haven't found any settings that seem like they would make this happen.

[mgagnonlv]

Check your server settings. I once had a frightening experience like that.

About 1 year ago, my domain host had added an automatic feature where they added a "backup and archive" feature for added safety protection. The way it was worded, I thought they simply had added a backup to existing folders. However, it turned out that the procedure actually moved messages from "inbox" and "sent" folders (other used-defined ones could be added) to "Archives". When I saw the culprit, I de-activated the cron procedure and put back messages in their original place.

So check Rackspace settings to see if they archive automatically messages older than "some date" or "more than 50 days old", and check online if you might have an "archive" folder on Rackspace.


BTW: Close Thunderbird and do a full backup of your profile folder. That's useful if you mess things up in the process!