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Downloaded emails older than 5 days are scrambled

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by Toad-Hall

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just this past week, any email in my inbox older than 5 days is scrambled or blank. I saw a post on the help board from user 1snikrep that seems to be the same as mine. I will note my problem also started the week 11/29 as well. It looks as if my Thunderbird upgraded to 38.4.0, although I think that happened on Monday 11/30 as I was trying to fix the problem and noticed I was not up to date. I am using Windows 10 Home Edition OS. One of the posted solutions was to Repair the Inbox, I tried this and ALL old emails that were scrambled or blank disappeared!

just this past week, any email in my inbox older than 5 days is scrambled or blank. I saw a post on the help board from user 1snikrep that seems to be the same as mine. I will note my problem also started the week 11/29 as well. It looks as if my Thunderbird upgraded to 38.4.0, although I think that happened on Monday 11/30 as I was trying to fix the problem and noticed I was not up to date. I am using Windows 10 Home Edition OS. One of the posted solutions was to Repair the Inbox, I tried this and ALL old emails that were scrambled or blank disappeared!

All Replies (3)

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You might try maintaining your inbox and other folders before it gets to that point. Repairing the folder salvages usable messages. If they disappear in that process they were already gone.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keep_it_working_-_Thunderbird

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Dang...harsh dose of reality...thank you for your help. I had it on my to do list to clean up my inbox, just kept slipping on the priority list and now its to late.

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Do you have an anti-virus/firewall product scanning Thunderbird files and folders?

The following info may explain the reason you are missing emails. I cannot definately say it caused the issue, but it does sound like it.

If anti-virus/firewall product detected anything amiss or even a false positive, then it might have quarrantined/fixed the entire mbox file. This would not effect the indexing file, so it would continue to try to show basic header info but of course no content as the actual file containing the email had been messed up by the anti-virus program.

Suggest you either stop anti-virus from scanning Thunderbird profile folders or at the very least change the settings, so that it asks you what to do with the file rather than 'auto fix' it.

Info supplied by Airmail is good and I would recommend it as well.