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POP3 Email Account missing after adding IMAP account.

  • 4 replies
  • 3 have this problem
  • 13 views
  • Last reply by Artman

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I have 9 email accounts setup in Thunderbird. Yesterday (3/1), I was helping out my son diagnose an issue with his email. So I setup up an IMAP account in Thunderbird to his email server. That worked fine. But later I noticed that one of my email accounts was missing. I know it was there before I setup the IMAP account because I saved some email attachments from that account.

I looked in my AppData>Roaming>Thunderbird>Profile>[profile name]>Mail folder and the account name folder is no longer listed. It was no longer listed in prefs.js either. And prefs.js now had a date of 03/01/2018. So I thought maybe it got deleted. I used a couple of file undelete programs to see if the files were deleted. I came back with this:


[C:] NTFS, 1,850 GB. Cluster size: 4096. File record size: 1024. Found 2 files.



Filename Size Path


Sent 406220 C:\Users\BBBB\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\6wwjjbnn.default\Mail\mail.mailboxname.com\ Unrecoverable This file overwritten with C:\Users\BBBB\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\6wwjjbnn.default\ImapMail\websitehostserver.net\INBOX

Sent.msf 27758 C:\Users\BBBB\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\6wwjjbnn.default\Mail\mail.mailboxname.com\ Unrecoverable This file overwritten with C:\Users\BBBB\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\6wwjjbnn.default\ImapMail\websitehostserver.net\INBOX

Which tells me the SENT folder for this account was overwritten by the IMAP account.

I have check LocalFolders for any files. Nothing there.

I did find references to the missing account in panacea.dat. But I don't know if that is relevent.

Is there any way to find out if the files still exist or are they gone? And why did the new IMAP account cause this?

I have 9 email accounts setup in Thunderbird. Yesterday (3/1), I was helping out my son diagnose an issue with his email. So I setup up an IMAP account in Thunderbird to his email server. That worked fine. But later I noticed that one of my email accounts was missing. I know it was there before I setup the IMAP account because I saved some email attachments from that account. I looked in my AppData>Roaming>Thunderbird>Profile>[profile name]>Mail folder and the account name folder is no longer listed. It was no longer listed in prefs.js either. And prefs.js now had a date of 03/01/2018. So I thought maybe it got deleted. I used a couple of file undelete programs to see if the files were deleted. I came back with this: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ [C:] NTFS, 1,850 GB. Cluster size: 4096. File record size: 1024. Found 2 files. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Filename Size Path ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sent 406220 C:\Users\BBBB\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\6wwjjbnn.default\Mail\mail.mailboxname.com\ Unrecoverable This file overwritten with C:\Users\BBBB\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\6wwjjbnn.default\ImapMail\websitehostserver.net\INBOX Sent.msf 27758 C:\Users\BBBB\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\6wwjjbnn.default\Mail\mail.mailboxname.com\ Unrecoverable This file overwritten with C:\Users\BBBB\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\6wwjjbnn.default\ImapMail\websitehostserver.net\INBOX Which tells me the SENT folder for this account was overwritten by the IMAP account. I have check LocalFolders for any files. Nothing there. I did find references to the missing account in panacea.dat. But I don't know if that is relevent. Is there any way to find out if the files still exist or are they gone? And why did the new IMAP account cause this?

All Replies (4)

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despite all your forensic stuff, I think the adding of an account and the missing account are not related,

Adding an IMAP account goes on in the imap mail folder.... pop accounts and local folders are in mail.

the result you get is exactly what I would expect to see if Thunderbird compacted a folder. The original file replaced by the compacted one.

So lets start at the beginning and that is not the file system. Open the troubleshooting information on the help menu. Is your missing account listed in the accounts section there?

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Matt, No it is not listed, The troubleshooting information lists accounts in order from 1-10 with no account 9. That is the one that has disappeared.

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Can you confirm that you did not access Pop mail account in Account Settings and alter any server settings.

Please Confirm the exact process you used to create the imap mail account. When creating a new imap mail account did you do the following or something slightly different? Please try to remember exactly how you created that account.

  • Menu icon > New Message > Existing Mail account
  • entered name, email address and password
  • clicked on 'Continue'
  • imap data was auto located or you clicked on Manual Config to set up server settings.
  • clicked on 'Done' to create account.
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No, I did not alter any server settings. All the other accounts are working fine. They all use the same incoming and outgoing servers setting ports.

Tools>Account Settings >Account Actions> Add Mail Account Entered Name, email password Continue Manually setup the incoming and outgoing server ports.