I lost all 6 months of messages in one my Inboxes after TB recreated it following an improper shutdown & chkdsk. All my other TB folders are fine.
The damaged mail account is a pop3 account.
I don’t believe I have a useful backup of the missing Inbox email.
The problem occurred after my Win7 PC shut down unexpectedly from an unstable overclock (now fixed).
Firefox, Thunderbird (TB), and MS-Word were running.
The PC automatically rebooted and ran chkdsk.
When I rebooted and opened TB, it presented an empty Inbox for this account.
The new account wizard did not run.
All other TB folders in that account and my several other accounts (both imap and pop3) are intact and working fine.
TB is now functioning normally, but I can’t locate the original contents of my Inbox (maybe 1000 messages from 1-1-18 to 7-10-18)
New mail is collecting in the new pop3 Inbox created for this account by TB.
I stupidly emptied my Recycle bin before noticing this problem.
I have not compacted my TB folders since the problem occurred.
The “Repair Folder” TB utility does not fix problem.
My personal addresses in Address Book are fine.
I don’t believe my prefs.js file is corrupted, as it is large and detailed and seems to cover all my email accounts.
I've tried working through the various support files here on Mozilla.org, but in several days I haven't figured this one out. Appreciate any help the community can offer me. I will check for feedback in the morning. Thank you.
All Replies (5)
my guess is chkdsk "fixed" the files allocation information. Perhaps even removed the entry. As this is a low level Windows function the usual answer is recovery is not possible. While recovery of "data" is technically feasible, usually it is not possible except in a forensic situation at great expense.
There are tools that can do some things, and based on the fact Thunderbird stores mail in a text file you might stand a chance of at least some recovery.
See https://www.raymond.cc/blog/how-to-recover-chk-files-created-by-chkdsk-and-scandisk/
Thanks for the reply. I think you are onto the answer.
I photographed the ongoing chkdsk activity screens while the problem was occurring last week. I’ll attach the two photos. It says in the first screen that chkdsk is “Deleting index entry popstate-2.dat in index $130 of file 123142” and “Deleting index entry POPSTA~2.DAT in index $130 of file 123142.” That’s probably my problem.
Is there any way to restore that popstate-2.dat entry to set things right again? I bought a recovery program, Recuva, fwiw.
I’ve also now noticed that my Firefox account is not remembering to load my bookmarks, which I have to import every time I launch the program. I guess I’ll have to create new profiles for Firefox and TB. What a mess!
Thanks for any help you can provide me.
popstate.dat files are not very important. In their absence Thunderbird just downloads all mail currently on the mail server. The issue will be in a file called inbox.
I don’t know how to get back to my earlier version of that Inbox file. If I can find it, I’ll move the new emails into a different folder, replace the new Inbox with the old version, then refile the new mail back into my Inbox. Presto.
But what did chkdsk or Win7 do with the original Inbox? And how can I recover it? The Inbox for that account in my TB profile contains just email since the crash event last week. I’ve looked for a found.000 file but don’t see one. What drive would chkdsk put it on, I guess the data drive where my Mozilla profiles reside and where chkdsk ran? Or could something be on C drive?
I ran Recuva on the data drive and it generated among a zillion other files a big zip file called “Thunderbird emails.zip”. But win7 won’t extract it! I suspect it’s just all the email I’ve deleted over the years.
Thanks for helping me.
Sorry, I did not notice the link in your first reply. I’m working on that advice now.