Dormammu I've come to bargain... (deleted mail loop)
Hello everyone,
I have a customer who uses an IMAP connection to use his Gmail in Thunderbird. On his iPhone, Mail app, he was emptying some folders and didn't notice he selected the All Mail folder and proceeded to empty it also. Then without noticing what he did, he emptied his trash folder. *face palm* All of his mail is gone from Gmail now.
I have a couple days old backup of his Thunderbird profile before all this happened. I can make a new profile and copy in the backup minus the logins.json and I can see all his stuff, but only for that one instance. I can't copy out messages because it wants to authenticate and since the logins.json isn't there it can't. If I try changing settings to make Thunderbird be offline on startup, closing Thunderbird and relaunching makes the entire folder tree on the left loose all of its branches and leaves. So I delete the profile contents and copy in the backup, launch Thunderbird, and it's all there again but I can't do anything with it. And the loop continues. Can someone please help me defeat Dormammu?
All Replies (3)
A backup restore will not work, it will synchronize to oblivion as soon as the connection is made because the server is considered to be the canonical source. So other round about methods have to be used. Slow and cumbersome is the result. Restoring mail to gmail in groups sometime as few as 50 and never more than a parentage of the gmail daily bandwidth allocation.
You could use the import export tools to import the backup folders to the local folders part of Thunderbird and gradually copy mails back t the gmail folders they came from. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools-ng/?src=ss
Unfortunately a lot of IMAP data loss by is caused by people who do not know they do not know what they are doing. Just as you describe. But they always reach out expecting a miracle solution for their hasty decisions and one does not exist. There is no easy solution.
I would suggest you wait until you get the 78.8.1 release that is currently occurring. While I have not confirmed it I understand it has some bug fixes for this upcoming uploading IMAP use.
Matt, thanks for the response. I tried every option in ImportExportTools and most options would export the folders with no contents, or if I tried running it on single folders only one email would export out of hundreds. Not sure what the deal is, but it may be that it just wants to authenticate indefinitely and refuses to do anything until it succeeds which won't happen.
I also tried setting up completely empty new profile and pointing ImportExportTools to the ImapMail folder and got nothing. And in one last ditch effort, I tried just dumping the contents of ImapMail into Mail\Local Folders without any results either.
I can always view any and all emails for the one session though, so that will have to do so he can access anything important.
I think you should open the actual mbox files yourself in the folders and see what is in them (use a text editor like notepad++ as it handles the large files much better that windows notepad... while you are there look for lines containing X-Mozilla-Status: and note the number.... 11 for instance is read mail note especially for 08 which is deleted. Each email has a status and the oldest email starts the file and they follow one another.
It is entirely possible that there never were any or only a few emails in the mbox files as IMAP has settings to not store mail locally. Hence my suggestion to actually look in the files.
FYI mbox files have no extension, but are accompanied be an MSF file with the same name that is Thunderbird's index of mail in the folder.