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Thunderbird and Old GMail Messaged

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  • Last reply by david

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Hello Everybody!

I've installed Portable Thunderbird and updated it to version 115.5.0 (32 bit). Unfortunately for me I had a media failure and cannot access e-mails stored locally. I'm using POP3 access to GMail and I have about couple hundreds of e-mails that I've downloaded with old Thunderbird. I wonder, is it possible to force Thunderbird to re-read existing e-mails and if possible how this can be done. New income mail is processed correctly.

Thank you in advance. With best regards, Nick Sorokin e-mail: Nick.Sorokin@gmail.com

Hello Everybody! I've installed Portable Thunderbird and updated it to version 115.5.0 (32 bit). Unfortunately for me I had a media failure and cannot access e-mails stored locally. I'm using POP3 access to GMail and I have about couple hundreds of e-mails that I've downloaded with old Thunderbird. I wonder, is it possible to force Thunderbird to re-read existing e-mails and if possible how this can be done. New income mail is processed correctly. Thank you in advance. With best regards, Nick Sorokin e-mail: Nick.Sorokin@gmail.com

Chosen solution

Well, worst case would be to just delete the account and recreate it. But first, log onto Gmail online and verify that you have Gmail set to allow POP access.

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Log onto Gmail and move the files back to inbox. If they are still there, then look in windows file explorer when TB is NOT running and delete the popstate.dat file. That will cause TB to redownload the messages. To reach that file, you can select help>troubleshootinginformation, scroll down to profile folder and click 'open folder' and then click The Mail folder, and then your POP account folder and the file should be there. The new mail will also be redownloaded.

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Hi David,

Thanks for suggestion, however it didn't help me: I followed steps, removed popstate.dat file while Thunferbird was not running and start program again. The result was - "No new messages" and no mails were downloaded.

Regards, Nick

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check gmail online to verify that all messages are in inbox.

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Have checked twice: they are in Inbox and have status "not read"

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Chosen Solution

Well, worst case would be to just delete the account and recreate it. But first, log onto Gmail online and verify that you have Gmail set to allow POP access.

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Hi David,

It didn't come to the worst case: I have loaded messages from GMail.

I have checked POP settings on GMail server - it was already set but to download again it was necessary to set it as "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)" and then TB had loaded all of Inbox

Thanks a lot of your help.

With best regards, Nick Sorokin (ex MBCS CITP}

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You're welcome. I'm glad it was a successful outcome.