IMAP or POP? btw, an aside, clicking on a link from a 'known source' does not guarantee the safety of the link.

I think it's IMAP - there's a folder in the Profile called ImapMail Thanks.

An IMAP account mirrors what's present on your Email provider's server. Unless you make offline copies of those emails, they are subject to deletion and addition as and when you - or your provider - alter the contents of the folders.

Have you checked your online interface to see if the emails are present?

btw, I have an IMAPMail folder in my profile, too, but I run POP. The account type is displayed in 'Server Settings' under the account in 'Account Settings'.

First thing to check would be whether your messages are still on the server, which you can do using the webmail interface of your e-mail provider. In the case of Gandi, you can find it here:

https://webmail.gandi.net/

I stopped using Gandi some time ago because of their outrageous e-mail prices, but used it in the past (when prices were reasonable) and can tell you the two webmail options provided (SOGo and Roundcube) have similar functionality. Choosing one over the other is a matter of personal preference and either one will allow you to see whether the messages are still there.

frisée - thanks for telling me how to see if it's POP or IMAP. Oddly enough, my husband's is IMAP and mine is POP. My husband doesn't use his much anymore (so he says) because he looks at mail on his iPad. Anyway, for this current issue, there were no problems with his Thunderbird email. Anything else I should be looking at? DavidGG - thanks for telling me how to look up the email on the Gandi server. I'll try that and let you know if I find the emails there. I know what you mean about the Gandi email price, but we want to keep the domain name...

haha I can't get into the webmail because I don't have a password. Looking into that now...

haha I can't get into the webmail because I don't have a password. Looking into that now...

Checking passwords can be done by accessing the Hamburger icon (top right)/Settings/Search for 'Password'/Saved Passwords/Show Passwords (use your windows log in to access the information).

POP should download the email and, then, according to your setting, can delete the emails or leave them there. Go to the Hamburger icon (top right)/Account Settings/Server Settings. On the right is your option to do either.

It isn't clear whether you and your husband are accessing the same or different e-mail accounts. This is important because accessing the same account from different computers or mail clients is a very common cause for this kind of problems when not configured or used properly.

haha I can't get into the webmail because I don't have a password. Looking into that now...

Sure you do have a password. Password for webmail is the same as the one used by Thunderbird for that account.

I know what you mean about the Gandi email price, but we want to keep the domain name...

Well, you'd have to move your domain to another registrar and use the mail service provided by that (it's what I did), but yeah, it may seem complicated if you don't know how those things work.

frisée - you lost me. I don't see a Hamburger icon anywhere (I learned on Fortran so the whole icon thing has always been difficult) - not Thunderbird, not SOGo webmail. Maybe because I am on an Apple, not running Windows? Regardless, I did find a way to set/reset a password. Maybe it was originally set so long (20 years?) and never used (I'm the only one who uses this computer). So I was able to look at webmail: 20 messages in the Inbox. And the missing ones (I remember a few recent ones) are not there or in the Deleted, Trash, or Archive folders on webmail. So have I lost the 7000 messages for good?

If your Inbox folder has not been compacted since the message loss you could try to recover your lost emails with the new add-on "Undelete" https://www.ggbs.de/extensions/Undelete.html I have tested it and it works fine in Imap and POP accounts. It is based on the fact that deleted messages are still present in the corresponding mailbox file in the Thunderbird profile folder but marked as "deleted" in the X-Mozilla-Status as long as the Inbox folder has not been compacted.

You say your account was configured as POP in Thunderbird. If that's correct, then within your profile folder, at the same level as the ImapMail folder that you said you saw there, there should also be a Mail folder, and within it a folder named after your mail server. Your messages would be stored in a file called Inbox there. The size of that file will give you an indication of whether your messages are still there, but anyway you may open that file with a text editor to see its contents.

And if your messages are gone, but you have a backup made by Time Machine or some other tool, you may still be able to recover your messages from the backup.

The question remains what caused this to happen in the first place, though. If it was an IMAP account, they could have disappeared as a result of your husband having accessed the same account from his computer with POP, but you say it is the other way round and it's you who has the account configured as POP. That means you had a local copy of the messages on your computer that cannot have been affected by whatever happened to the messages on the server, so they can only have disappeared as a result of something you did or happened locally on your computer…

DavidGG - I found the Mail folder; it has a few subfolders, but only the archive.sbd subfolder has an Inbox file and it seems to be mostly code with a couple things that look like my husband's emails from 2015 and 2017. None of mine. And yes, you are entirely correct that the real question is what happened in the first place. I went back to look at POP v IMAP again and I did have that wrong: my account is IMAP; my husband's is POP. But he does not see my emails on his iPad, while I can see his on the MacBook Air. I don't think I'll ever know just what happened.

Mapenzi - you suggested something if the inbox folder hadn't been compacted; unfortunately, I recall seeing something flash at the bottom of the window when I returned to email to find all the messages disappeared - I think it said something about compacting...too fast for me to comprehend in the shock of not seeing any emails. So I think I'm too late to follow your suggestion.

So unless any of you have further suggestions, I guess I have to resign myself to the loss, be far more careful of opening links in emails, and pay more attention when trying to multi-task. Thank you all for your help and patience.

I went back to look at POP v IMAP again and I did have that wrong: my account is IMAP; my husband's is POP.

Ahhh!!! Now, this makes sense and we could be getting closer to figure what happened…

If you're using IMAP, your messages may have been deleted from Thunderbird as a result of them being deleted from the server by someone else and then Thunderbird synchronising with the server, rather than by you clicking a link in some message, which frankly, I have a hard time believing could have anything to do with this, must have been coincidence.

Here is a possible scenario that would explain what happened, just to give you an idea of things to consider that you may not have thought of. If your husband accessed your mail account with POP, he may have inadvertently configured the account to remove messages from the server after downloading them ("Leave messages on server" part of the account "Server Settings"), and that would have caused the problem. He should have a local copy of the messages he downloaded from the server if he did that, though… unless he did something like deleting the account afterwards…

DavidGG - that's good information. I agree, I don't think it was clicking on the link that was the problem (and I checked with the sender - no one else had problems after clicking on that link). But I really don't think it's anything my husband did. He was out walking the dog at the time the emails disappeared and given how much effort it was for him to try to help (how do we get into Gandi, can we get to webmail, passwords?!, POP or IMAP, huh?, etc), I don't think he would have been able to do access my email using POP. Who else then? That's the scary part. Thanks anyway.

Well, there is one more thing you may try, and that's asking Gandi support to help you identify what (i.e. which mail client, which mail protocol, which actions) caused your messages to be deleted from the server. They may even have a backup and help you recover some of your mail from that. Don't count on it, but may be worth a try.