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Antivirus program removed "threats" from Thunderbird, now many of my emails are corrupted

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  • Last reply by christ1

Otto_M
Otto_M
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Today my antivirus program, ESET Smart Security, identified three "threats", which I allowed it to remove. I noticed that the threats were located in the folder where my Thunderbird profile is kept. After this, many of my emails are impossible to read in Thunderbird. Only some HTML code is shown, but it is the code of a completely different email than the one I tried to open. It seems everything got scrambled. Is there anyway to solve this? Sadly I didn't back up my profile recently.

Today my antivirus program, ESET Smart Security, identified three "threats", which I allowed it to remove. I noticed that the threats were located in the folder where my Thunderbird profile is kept. After this, many of my emails are impossible to read in Thunderbird. Only some HTML code is shown, but it is the code of a completely different email than the one I tried to open. It seems everything got scrambled. Is there anyway to solve this? Sadly I didn't back up my profile recently.

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christ1
christ1
  • Top 25 Contributor
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Sadly I didn't back up my profile recently.

The damage has been done by your anti-virus software corrupting Thunderbird mail files, which may also mean messages got lost. All you can do now is trying to fix the corruption.

First of all create a backup of your Thunderbird profile folder. https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profiles-tb#w_backing-up-a-profile

Then try to rebuild the index file of the troubled folder. Right-click the folder - Properties - Repair Folder

Note: depending on the corruption this may erase messages from the affected folder which cannot be recovered anymore. In that case you'd need to restore them from a recent backup done prior to the corruption.

Corruption is often caused by anti-virus software messing with Thunderbird mail files. It is therefore recommended to create an exception for the Thunderbird profile folder, so that the real-time scanner won't attempt to scan the profile with your mail.

For more information on the profile location see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Thunderbird

Also see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keep_it_working_-_Thunderbird