This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Əgər kömək lazımdırsa lütfən yeni sual verin.

2 years past messages gone from Tbird - new messages downloading fine - how to get old messages back?

  • 3 cavab
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by christ1

dollywalker
dollywalker
more options

On 9th October all messages from the last 2 years vanished from my T bird inbox. New messages are loading as normal and all the old messages are still on my webmail, how can I get them back into my inbox on my laptop? "Get messages" only downloads new ones. On Tbird they were tagged and flagged and showed whether or not I had answered them - I need that information! Cheers

On 9th October all messages from the last 2 years vanished from my T bird inbox. New messages are loading as normal and all the old messages are still on my webmail, how can I get them back into my inbox on my laptop? "Get messages" only downloads new ones. On Tbird they were tagged and flagged and showed whether or not I had answered them - I need that information! Cheers

All Replies (3)

christ1
christ1
  • Top 25 Contributor
more options

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Disappearing_mail

Are you accumulating messages in Inbox?

If you do have a backup of your Thunderbird profile created prior to the incident you can restore the missing messages.

dollywalker
dollywalker Question owner
more options

I read through the article you referred to and nothing seemed to apply. I searched online again and came across a solution in an old community post, as follows: 

#Empty the Inbox folder in Thunderbird by moving all messages to other folders or deleting them.

Close Thunderbird. Navigate to the profile folder and locate the file popstate.dat. Rename that file to popstatedat.old Restart Thunderbird and it should download all messages in the Gmail Inbox "folder".

This worked fine except I don't have my tags and flags back. I will find out how to create a backup of my profile next time I am working on the computer so if it happens again it will be easier to recover stuff. Thanks for your help.

christ1
christ1
  • Top 25 Contributor
more options
I will find out how to create a backup of my profile

https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data#w_backing-up-a-profile