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Thunderbird emails automatically deleted.

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Bill Rogers
Bill Rogers
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Help! All my email has suddenly disappeared from both Thunderbird and the server. Is there any way to recover it?

For a long time, Thunderbird was not connecting to my Yahoo small business account. Today I opened Thunderbird to find an old email address and it was able to connect to Yahoo. My newer emails seemed to be downloaded. Thunderbird offered to delete 258 emails I had deleted online with Yahoo that were still in the local storage (ads, etc.). I said yes. After lunch I came back and found I had nothing in my inbox, either on Yahoo or in Thunderbird. They are not in trash. I suspect that Thunderbird automatically downloads the messages from the server, then not finding them on the server, deletes them locally too.

Help! All my email has suddenly disappeared from both Thunderbird and the server. Is there any way to recover it? For a long time, Thunderbird was not connecting to my Yahoo small business account. Today I opened Thunderbird to find an old email address and it was able to connect to Yahoo. My newer emails seemed to be downloaded. Thunderbird offered to delete 258 emails I had deleted online with Yahoo that were still in the local storage (ads, etc.). I said yes. After lunch I came back and found I had nothing in my inbox, either on Yahoo or in Thunderbird. They are not in trash. I suspect that Thunderbird automatically downloads the messages from the server, then not finding them on the server, deletes them locally too.

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Toad-Hall
Toad-Hall
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re :258 emails I had deleted online with Yahoo

If you have an imap account setup in thunderbird, then it can only display whatever is held on the server. If you delete emails off server via yahoo webmail account then they will be deleted from the imap folders. If you delete an emails from an imap folder then it will also be deleted off the server, so will not be visible via webmail account. Imap folders constantly synchronise with server folders of same name, they are in effect one and the same.

If you have a POP account then it will download whatever is in the server Inbox. If you do not have settings to 'keep messages on server' then the server will delete those 'popped' emails, but this will not effect emails in the pop account as the folders do not synchronise.

If you have settings in the mail account Account Settings to delete emails older than x days then they will be deleted from the account in Thunderbird and also off the server.

If you delete emails then the automatic settings for compacting (assuming it is set up) will prompt you to purge previously deleted emails. Basically, when you delete or move an email from a folder, the original is still in the folder but hidden and marked as deleted. To tidy up the folder, compacting removes those previously marked as deleted emails. This basic housekeeping is necessary to help maintain folders, it does not delete emails that have not been previously deleted. However, if file was already corrupted then compacting may not be able to read the file correctly causing a loss of emails. This 'corruption' can be caused by various things but the two main culprits are serious lack of regular compacting and an Anti-Virus which has scanned and tried to fix a file.

So if the message was : "The messages you have deleted can be purged from disk" then this means those messages have already been deleted. So if you deleted emails off server via yahoo webmail and you have an imap account, then the synchronisation between imap account and folder would have removed them prompting the pop up message for you to clean up files containing previously deleted emails.