All saved mail in an IMAP account has vanished & replacing INBOX with an older saved version doesn't work
About a week ago all my saved mails on the inbox of my Yahoo IMAP account disappeared from Thunderbird on my MacBook and also from the server. Two other folders in the account to which I'd previously transferred mails remain intact.
I tried replacing INBOX-1, INBOX-1.msf and INBOX.msf in the imap.mail.yahoo.com folder (Library>Thunderbird>Profiles>n2j0cgku.default>ImapMail>imap.mail.yahoo.com>INBOX&c.)
- with an older backed-up version (about 12Mb of mails) but on re-starting Thunderbird, none of these showed up in the account, and when I looked at INBOX-1 again, it had emptied out and only contained a few bytes.
Does anyone have a work-around to make Thunderbird accept the older inbox? Thanks!
Solution choisie
You might try this add on and see if it can recover the messages from you backup into your local folders. If you get them into a local folder you might be able to get them back on the server.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/
I have not used it but it is mentioned often here in the forums.
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In IMAP email the messages are stored on the providers server and viewed remotely with email clients on your computer and phone. If the messages are gone from the server they are gone unless you actually made a backup of the messages.
The messages are stored, but only on my Time Machine backup. The problem is getting them back into Thunderbird! Thanks for answering so quickly...
Solution choisie
You might try this add on and see if it can recover the messages from you backup into your local folders. If you get them into a local folder you might be able to get them back on the server.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/
I have not used it but it is mentioned often here in the forums.
Thanks VERY much! Importexport tools is a bit fiddly to use but it works... Looking back through the INBOX files of various dates on my Time Machine backups, it looks as if Thunderbird kept everything from 2009 until mid- February 2014, after which date it has recreated a new INBOX file from time to time, destroying the previous one in the process and so losing all its data. I wish it wouldn't! Nasty habit!
Anyway, thanks to you I have now recovered everything on a dedicated folder in Thunderbird... if you have any further bright ideas about how to stop Thunderbird becoming Alzheimic, I'd be even more grateful!