1343378 - I lost all of my emails in my inbox twice in 6 months, new emails still come in

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[phillip.r.decker]

Attachment: Thunderbird.rtf troubleshooting info

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:51.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/51.0
Build ID: 20170125094131

Steps to reproduce:

I started Thunderbird to check emails and noted that all of the previous emails in the inbox had disappeared. My sent and trash folders still contained their content. Any newly downloaded emails appear in my inbox. Thunderbird updates itself automatically. Most of my emails come from trade publications such as Nasa Tech Briefs and EE Times Daily with remote content and I leave them in my inbox for archive purposes. I don't download remote content automatically. The first time it happened was in September 2016 and the second time was today February 2017. I uninstalled and reinstalled Thunderbird in September. The first time it happened I had over 10,000 emails in my inbox and this time was less than 2,000. I am using Windows 7 Pro on a Dell Laptop.


Actual results:

All of the emails in my inbox disappeared but the sent and trash folders were unchanged


Expected results:

All of the emails in my inbox should have remained in my inbox.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I can imagine this is a pop account. Is that correct?
And which AV software are you running? 
Do you know whether the AV software excludes Thunderbird from its scanning?

Bad idea to leave "inactive" messages in an Inbox. If they are archival material, then you should do exactly that, archive them to a different folder.

Comment 2

[phillip.r.decker]

It is a pop account and I use Microsoft Security Essentials with no exclusions set up.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

It may not be true in your case, but one of the most common causes of lost Inbox is antivirus software.  You might check the AV quarantine. You might want to review http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_Anti-virus_Software

Comment 4

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

This is a support case.

Please note: Bugzilla is NOT a support forum. It is a tracking system for bugs in Mozilla products.
This is a support question. You can get support here:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/thunderbird

That said: I've been using Thunderbird since 2010 with five POP accounts, an IMAP account and various feed accounts. I've never lost a single message. Of course, when you use POP, you need to have your own backup scheme.

As Wayne said, large inboxes are a bad idea, "inactive" messages should be moved elsewhere. In case of messages from mailing lists, you should consider establishing message filters that will move new messages to an appropriate folder upon receipt. Should the inbox get lost again due to some reason, at least you will have the other folders.