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All my Local folders on Thunderbird have vanished. Is there a way to retrieve them?

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  • Last reply by PaulDavo

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Hi Support Community, I'm hoping someone can help me with the following. I have all my archived mail in local folders in Thunderbird. When sending an email today Thunderbird responded with a message about not having enough space to send the mail (I can't remember the precise syntax and it wasn't a message I'd seen before). I cleared out the trash in both the server side and the local side in case that would help. After that I was able to send the email. However after doing that I began to realise that as I entered my local folders, all of the messages had vanished. I went to check the source of the folders in the Local Directory but that was now empty, or simply had a 2K .msf 'stub' for those folders I'd recently entered. My back up has the "Users\xxx\AppData\Roaming" folder but is missing the Thunderbird folder and so there is no Local mail to help me recover. My questions are: 1) Does anyone know why deleting Trash would have had this impact on all my Local mail? 2) Most importantly, does anyone know a way to retrieve the deleted folders at either the Thunderbird level or OS level (Windows 10)? I've looked in the Recycle Bin and can see other files that I deleted today, but none with a .msf or .sbd suffix. I'm hoping they're hiding somewhere as I have a lot of email history sitting in them. Thanks in advance for any tips or advice.

Hi Support Community, I'm hoping someone can help me with the following. I have all my archived mail in local folders in Thunderbird. When sending an email today Thunderbird responded with a message about not having enough space to send the mail (I can't remember the precise syntax and it wasn't a message I'd seen before). I cleared out the trash in both the server side and the local side in case that would help. After that I was able to send the email. However after doing that I began to realise that as I entered my local folders, all of the messages had vanished. I went to check the source of the folders in the Local Directory but that was now empty, or simply had a 2K .msf 'stub' for those folders I'd recently entered. My back up has the "Users\xxx\AppData\Roaming" folder but is missing the Thunderbird folder and so there is no Local mail to help me recover. My questions are: 1) Does anyone know why deleting Trash would have had this impact on all my Local mail? 2) Most importantly, does anyone know a way to retrieve the deleted folders at either the Thunderbird level or OS level (Windows 10)? I've looked in the Recycle Bin and can see other files that I deleted today, but none with a .msf or .sbd suffix. I'm hoping they're hiding somewhere as I have a lot of email history sitting in them. Thanks in advance for any tips or advice.

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In case it helps, I've just had the original send problem occur again. I've attached the error, but it says: "There is not enough disk space to download new messages. Try deleting old mail, emptying the Trash folder, and compacting your mail folders, and then try again". I;ve deleted trash and compacted, my email seems to have vanished anyway, and my Inbox is not particularly big (less than 20 messages, 1.8mb). Anyone know what I need to do to overcome this issue? Thanks.