Corrupt inbox - I need to get my messages again from my IMAP server
My inbox got corrupted and I lost a month of emails. I still have my emails on my IMAP server. How do I re-download the emails from my IMAP server even though Tbird already downloaded them once? I set my IMAP emails to unread and that didn't work. What setting in Thunderbird will allow downloading of my IMAP emails again? Is there a cache or something I need to clear to do this? Thank you. Jon
Modified by jon107
All Replies (6)
Actually, they're always there. To have them on your PC, click file>offline>download
david said
Actually, they're always there. To have them on your PC, click file>offline>download
Not sure what you mean by "they're always there?" Where? Yes, the emails I lost are on my IMAP server but they are not in my Inbox folder in Tbird. I want to get those lost emails from my server, back into my Tbird inbox and sorted by date properly but Tbird already retrieved them once and setting my emails on my server to "unread" does not fool Tbird into retrieving them again. This is what I need to do. I need to tell Tbird to retrieve email files back from a certain date as to populate my inbox folder with the lost emails. When I click offline download, what am I downloading? Files from my server? If so, can I then merge or move them into my inbox folder that's on my hard drive?
Did you do it? My instructions tell Thunderbird to bring all messages from online to the PC. Isn't that what you want? Are you sure your account is IMAP? I ask that because all messages are always viewable online with an IMAP account, but your words imply that there are no messages.
Here's the issue I just realized. My email account (on my server) is IMAP but my Thunderbird account is setup as POP so that's probably why I don't see any sync options in my account settings. So what I'm trying now is setting up Tbird on another computer and I'm downloading my server emails now. Once they are downloaded, I'm going to grab the emails I need and move them to a new local folder then copy that local folder to my main computer and put that folder into my "local folders" for Tbird, then move the files I need into my inbox. Hopefully that will solve the problem for now, then I can back up my inbox and have all my current emails up to date. - Then, I'll look into switching my Tbird account over to IMAP from POP - looks like I need to create the new IMAP account and disable the POP account.
You: "looks like I need to create the new IMAP account".
Yep. Looks like that to me, too. I don't know of a way to turn a POP account into an IMAP account. [That doesn't mean there isn't a way, it just means that I don't know of one (yet).]
As @wisewiz indicated, there is no way to convert POP to IMAP (or the reverse), but you can have POP and IMAP accounts on the same version of Thunderbird. That is, you don't need a separate PC for the IMAP setup.