Missing Emails After Thunderbird Showed They Were Already Downloaded
115.05 when I started.
I typically open Thunderbird about once a month, download my emails from a hosted website, do some clean up, write some emails, close Thunderbird, and do the same about a month later.
Today I opened Thunderbird, saw that it was downloading around 400 emails in the lower left corner, and waited patiently, as per usual. When "done", however, none of them showed up in the main window. The latest email did not change, was still from around a month ago. When I ask Thunderbird to Get Messages it says there are no new emails to download.
I restarted Thunderbird several times, no change.
I then upgraded to 115.10, hoping this might fix the issue, but it has not.
Since restarting Thunderbird, 2 new emails have come in and are showing correctly, but none of the initial 400 emails "downloaded" today are showing anywhere.
I repaired the Inbox folder (right click > Properties > Repair Folder), no help. I renamed the "Inbox.msf" file and had Thunderbird rebuild it, no help. I renamed the "global-messages-db.sqlite" file and had Thunderbird rebuild it, no help. View Ignored Threads does not help. View > Threads > All is selected. Emails are not in the Trash folder, or any other folder.
All of the initial batch of 400 emails - and the emails I had previously opened - just disappeared.
Opening up the Inbox MBOX file directly, I can see that these 400 emails were never actually downloaded into this file. Not sure what happened.
Opening up my remote email host, I can see that those 400 emails are still there, to the exact point when I last closed Thunderbird.
Asking Thunderbird to download new messages does not download these remote emails.
How do I reset Thunderbird to start the process over and re-download these emails again? Part of TB seems to think it's already downloaded these emails, while another part of TB never actually did.
Does anyone have any idea what to do here?
Modified by misc32
Chosen solution
Ok, so I found the answer, via this post:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/999111
Solution: 1) Close TB 2) Find your profile account folder (something like "Mail\mail.website.net\") - See linked email above for more, or go to Help > Troubleshooting Info > Profile Folder 3) Locate and delete (or rename) the 'popstate.dat' file for this account - If you need to show file extensions then do so, google for more 4) Restart TB - TB will create a new copy of 'popstate.dat' and download ALL emails that are on your remote server for this account - Be careful, if you never delete emails from your remote server this will download ALL of them again - This solution is best for situations where you download from a remote server and then have TB or the remote server cull old emails periodically - You may get some duplicate emails, depending on your particular situation
This 'popstate.dat' file holds the IDs of the files that TB has downloaded from the remote site, and that have not been deleted from the remote site.
I'm not sure what happened in my case, TB seems to have thought it had downloaded these emails but in fact had not, strange. My email mbox files are on a network drive, but so are my profiles, so I'm not sure why one would work / be written to (the 'popstate' file) but not the other (the 'Inbox' file).
One thing I have done is stop filters from running automatically when getting new emails, and also preventing TB from downloading new emails on startup. I think the combo of all of these things with a network drive was too much for TB to handle at once. I now run these manually one by one.
Read this answer in context 👍 0All Replies (2)
(integrated into question)
Modified by misc32
Chosen Solution
Ok, so I found the answer, via this post:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/999111
Solution: 1) Close TB 2) Find your profile account folder (something like "Mail\mail.website.net\") - See linked email above for more, or go to Help > Troubleshooting Info > Profile Folder 3) Locate and delete (or rename) the 'popstate.dat' file for this account - If you need to show file extensions then do so, google for more 4) Restart TB - TB will create a new copy of 'popstate.dat' and download ALL emails that are on your remote server for this account - Be careful, if you never delete emails from your remote server this will download ALL of them again - This solution is best for situations where you download from a remote server and then have TB or the remote server cull old emails periodically - You may get some duplicate emails, depending on your particular situation
This 'popstate.dat' file holds the IDs of the files that TB has downloaded from the remote site, and that have not been deleted from the remote site.
I'm not sure what happened in my case, TB seems to have thought it had downloaded these emails but in fact had not, strange. My email mbox files are on a network drive, but so are my profiles, so I'm not sure why one would work / be written to (the 'popstate' file) but not the other (the 'Inbox' file).
One thing I have done is stop filters from running automatically when getting new emails, and also preventing TB from downloading new emails on startup. I think the combo of all of these things with a network drive was too much for TB to handle at once. I now run these manually one by one.
Modified by misc32