Scenario: thunderbird has more data than restored IMAP serve

[periodic]

Does anyone know how IMAP will sync emails in the current scenario?

[1] A shared hosting provider's servers were wiped in error on Friday. They are recovering the servers from a backup copy that is likely to have data from a few days before the failure, guessing last Weds.
[2] The local thunderbird has emails up to the Friday outage

When the restored servers come back online, will the IMAP server pick up the emails on thunderbird that arrived on Thurs and Friday? Or will the local email client lose the emails from that last day or two? Of course I'm hoping that the first scenario prevails, that the imap server will fill in any gaps in it's collection of emails that thunderbird has.

[DanRaisch]

Safest option would be to copy all messages received on Wed, Thursday and Friday to sub-folders of Local Folders. That way, if the messages with dates after Wednesday are deleted during the synch because they are not found on the server (which I think is likely scenario), you won't lose them. Aternatively, there are no messages deleted by the synch, in which you can delete those sub-folders of Local Folders without any concerns.

[periodic]

Right, that's what makes the most sense to me too. I've never created a local folder. I see how it's done. At the bottom of the account list on the left is "Local Folders"; right click and create a new folder called "myemail@whatever.com". Open the regular folder inbox for that email account and select the messages that are in the gap time period; right click, select Copy To: and pick the new folder under Local Folders. Repeat for Sent folder for the gap time period. Then, if there is a need to restore those gap emails, select them in the local folders, and copy to the main sent or inbox folders for the real email accounts.

Writing this out for the benefit of the person who's emails are at risk, which isn't me. Thanks Dan for your help with this.

[DanRaisch]

You're welcome.

Note that the names of the folders under Local Folders do not have to be the email addresses of the IMAP account. They could be if you want to readily recognize them but they could also be just "IMAPInbox" and "IMAPSent" or the like.

[periodic]

Right; I think the person who will be doing this has multiple accounts to deal with so having the email address in as the folder name, or anything that is distinct, was what I meant to indicate.

Half of the reason to stick with Thunderbird is the great community support that is offered here. The other half is how much thunderbird contributes to my daily productivity <g>.