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How to retrieve lost data after a Thunderbird email crash
On my Mac Mini, In my pacbell.net email Inbox using Firefox, when Thunderbird crashed. I did not see a crash report box. I restarted my Mac, opened Thunderbird and my inbox again and all data was lost after 6/23/16 5:53pm. The crash occurred today (12/31/16) at approx. 5:30pm pacific. New incoming is showing up. How can I restore the lost emails? Thanks.
Vsi odgovori (1)
I solved this problem on my PC.
The first thing to try is to right click on the folder where the messages have been lost. Then you will find a menu that includes properties. Left click on properties and an option to repair the folder appears.
I tried this but it did not work. How I fixed the problem was as follows:
This applies to a PC but I would imagine that a Mac uses a similar storage technique.
What I did was to navigate tot he file location where Thunderbird stores messages and then I opened the large inbox file using a text editor. I used MS notebook. I could then see the HTML content of each message. As there were so many messages, it took a long time to load them up in MS Notebook. Any simple text editor would do.
In the headers of each message was a line giving the X-Mozilla-Status:. In just about every case it was showing it as either 0009 or 0019 or 001b.
X-Mozilla-Status: 0009 or X-Mozilla-Status: 0019 or X-Mozilla-Status: 001b
I then used the search and replace function in the text editor to change the X-Mozilla-Status: to 0000 for every message. This step took a long time.
X-Mozilla-Status: 0000
I then over wrote the inbox file with the modified version (having previously backed up the corrupted inbox file) which had the X-Mozilla-Status: lines altered to 0000 for all messages.
Rebuilding the index files using the Thunderbird repair function and hey presto, my missing e-mails reappeared new, unread messages, complete with attachments.
I was then able to move them to the archive 2016 folder and all's well that ends well.
Thanks again for your help and I hope that this does not become necessary again.
I have a fairly powerful PC and even so, each stage of this process took a lot of time.