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Thunderbird deletes entire inbox instead of just the selected emails

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  • Igcine ukuphendulwa ngu Matt

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Sometimes when I delete a group of emails from my inbox it deleted the entire inbox. It has happened twice now. When it did it yesterday I had 8 emails selected for deletion. When I hit delete it deleted all 2200 emails in the box. When it was deleting them I confirmed that only 8 were selected by looking at the number of selected in the lower right corner of the screen. Worse, when I click undo the delete it does not restore the 2200 deleted but only the 8 that I had selected for deletion. This is a serious bug and has resulted in loss of all my emails over the few years.

Sometimes when I delete a group of emails from my inbox it deleted the entire inbox. It has happened twice now. When it did it yesterday I had 8 emails selected for deletion. When I hit delete it deleted all 2200 emails in the box. When it was deleting them I confirmed that only 8 were selected by looking at the number of selected in the lower right corner of the screen. Worse, when I click undo the delete it does not restore the 2200 deleted but only the 8 that I had selected for deletion. This is a serious bug and has resulted in loss of all my emails over the few years.

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Thunderbird uses a dedicated"index" to display email in a list in the user interface. It is not "connected" to the actual mails on your computer, and I have seen many occasions over the years where this list of just plain wrong.

I am guessing what you are seeing is essentially this, with the system rebuilding that list post the deletion of the 8 email and coming up empty. The most common cause historically was an antivirus program "quarantining" the entire POP inbox to block the email in it that it does not like. Thunderbird knows nothing of the file suddenly going missing and only when something occurs that causes the list to be updated from source does the loss of mail become apparent. Compacting is a very common cause of this apparent loss of data "now" and apparently in your case multiple selection for deletion.