Thundebird messages mysteriously moved out of my inbox...

[MichaelArmstrong]

... how do I get them back into the archive?

I have no idea what happened, or when, but 519 messages from June 2016 now appear as .eml files in a TEMP folder. They all have a "Date modified" of 9/4/2016 (at ~5AM, so I'm pretty sure I didn't do this). When I open one of them, it's opened by Thunderbird as expected, but in a new window, and looks like a reasonable message. I don't see any way to get it back into my current Thunderbird structure. How can I get them all into the 2016 archive?

[DanRaisch]

I don't have any idea what caused those message to be moved out of Thunderbird but you can use this extension to import .eml files into Thunderbird. https://freeshell.de/~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html

[MichaelArmstrong]

It turns out I had installed that extension in October 2010, but over the years TBird recognized it was out of date and no longer activated it. So I installed the current version today, and hopefully my problem will be solved. Thanks for the reminder.

[DanRaisch]

You're welcome and good luck.

[MichaelArmstrong]

Well, I tried ImportExport tools, and it claims it imported the 517 .eml files OK, but God knows where they are. I've looked in every Thunderbird folder, and they aren't there, and in fact the only place that Windows Explorer Search can find them is in the original file. I've written the author to see if he can help, but he appears to be pretty busy with other things these days.

[DanRaisch]

Did you first select a folder in TB into which the import was to take place? That has to be a folder of a POP account or a sub-folder of Local Folders

[MichaelArmstrong]

Did you first select a folder in TB into which the import was to take place? That has to be a folder of a POP account or a sub-folder of Local Folders

Yes; it's a POP account; I tried Inbox and the correct Archive year for the .eml files that got misplaced. I'll try a sub-folder of Local Folders tomorrow.

[MichaelArmstrong]

I couldn't wait. Tried a dummy folder in Local Folders and it worked. Then I was able to copy all the messages to the Archive folder and that worked. And, due to a date mixup in the rogue .eml files that had me confused (not an abnormal state), it now looks like they may have been imported as requested in the first 4 attempts. But another "remove duplicate files" addon fixed that, so I'm good.

[DanRaisch]

Glad to hear that.