Do you have a backup of your system? Also, was it the 2004 feature update, or some other update?

Hi Stans, I didn't back up prior to update, It was the 2004 as I had a message saying that my version of 10 wouldn't be supported after 13 October, so I thought I better update.

I am not very techy having not worked for 15 years, so any help very much appreciated!

thanks Alexa

Go to C:\Windows.old\Users\<username>\Roaming. Roaming is a hidden folder, so you need to enable viewing of hidden folders to see it. Open it and see if you have a folder named Thunderbird.

Have managed to check Users - there are three listed - my husband, home and public - checked roaming for all although not able to access in public. no Thunderbird file in the other 2.

You do not mention whether you have located the 'windows.old' folder. You need to find a folder that Windows OS created. It is called 'windows.old'. Have you located that folder ? Open File Explorer. On the left pane, click the 'This PC' option. Double-click the Local Disk/OS (C:) drive. You should now be able to see the 'Windows.old' folder. Double-click the Windows.old folder to see contents.

You are looking for: Windows.old \Users\<user account name>\Appdata\Roaming folder That 'Roaming' folder will contain the 'Thunderbird' folder. You need to copy that 'Thunderbird' folder.

If you have Thunderbird installed - it must not be running. So exit Thunderbird now if it is running.

Then on your computer access: Users\your User Account name\Appdata\Roaming folder Paste the copied 'Thunderbird' folder into the 'Roaming' folder. Start Thunderbird.

Originally I did have Thunderbird open, however now retried - still no Thunderbird file in Roaming only Microsoft in any of my User Account names.

I have just rechecked my bin - I did this as soon as my e-mails had disappeared and there was nothing there - now there are several thousand e mails going back to April 2019!

However I am happy to say the e-mails from my inbox are also there.

I have no idea why this would happen - I delete emails all the time once dealt with so although only about 20 from my inbox were missing several had also disappeared from e-mail folders that I save some in.

Any suggestions as to what I can do to prevent this in future - I am guessing it has something to do with the Windows update.

Thank you for all you suggestions

Alexa

I don't think I understood your original post. Did you mean that messages had been deleted and that Activity Manager actually showed evidence of the deletion?

To prevent loss of data, there's only one solution; backup. Every computer user should have a backup strategy for their important data and system. There are countless tutorials about system and data backup on the web, just do a Google search and read to your heart's content, then employ a strategy. At a minimum, I recommend an external hard drive that you only connect when taking or restoring a backup, and a backup program to automate and manage the backups.

For a dedicated email archiving solution, you could use MailStore Home.

Hi Stans,

Exactly as your first sentence.

I have Thunderbird Beta installed (from my local computer company), so I don't know if that has anything to do with it. Anyway I am going to try to switch to regular Thunderbird and make sure I backup e-mails in future. The weird thing is it also deleted them from my actual gmail account too.

Anyway thanks for your help.

Best regards

Alexa

Yeah, you should be running the stable release version, not beta, although I doubt if the deletion has anything to do with beta because we would have seen similar reports. It could be a misconfigured or rogue filter in Tbird or Gmail, or even a hacked account! It's also highly unlikely to be the Windows update. That could have simply been coincidental.