Suddenly today my messages are missing headers or entirely blank
Got up this morning and went to my laptop which is always on. My inbox had a few new items but they all were showing html code rather than properly a interpreted html-based email. Also the headers were not showing. This was strange since all was fine yesterday.
Did a search which indicated that I should repair the folder. So I did and that erased all my inbox contents including a few treasured items.
Did some reading on how to restore the profile(?) which I attempted to do with my daily backups but that didn't do anything and now I don't know what to do.
Strange thing about my backups. When I selected the file to restore:
c:\users\myname\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\(xxx.default)
it showed dozens and dozens of things to restore, many of them seemingly associated with other apps and files and such that I would not expect to see in a 'thunderbird' folder. Is that what one should see under this path?
All Replies (1)
1. Backup the Profile folder, so if something else goes wrong while trying to fix the problems, will not be a death sentence. In fact, make sure that you regularly do backups.
2. You have to reboot your computer occasionally. Windows gets screwed up over time as it is running. Anyone who says they don't need to reboot, or won't reboot, is just asking for trouble. Plus they are ignoring reality. Believe me. I am a Windows computer tech.
3. The Thunderbird Inbox is the most used folder, and is the most vulnerable to corruption. Read and follow the advice in this article: Keep it working - Thunderbird.
4. Run a Check Disk to fix file errors. If it has been more than a year or two, run the Check disk to also scan for bad clusters on the hard drive. How to run a "Check Disk" in Windows. It may not completely fix the problem, but will help keeping it from getting worse.
5. After this if new e-mails coming in are OK, but the old e-mails are not, then some data recovery is in order. Meaning, looking at the actual contents of the mbox files outside of Thunderbird, and determining what is wrong with the e-mails, and fixing them. This will require knowledge of how the e-mails are supposed to look like, so you will have to compare good e-mails to bad. Or find someone who is more knowledgeable and/or comfortable doing this.
PS. The files and folders under "c:\users\myname\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\(xxx.default) " should only contain stuff for your Thunderbird Profile. Without seeing what you think doesn't belong, I cannot say one way or another if they belong there or not.
Modified by user1121639