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I need to recover lost emails, but rebuilding global database and msf index files did not fix this problem. How can 4 gigabytes of messages be saved?

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  • Last reply by sfhowes

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I have reindexed two folders of email messages, using Thunderbird, including deleting the global sqlite db and rebuilding, but I still cannot get Thunderbird to successfully reindex these very large files of email messages, 1 is over 4 gigabytes in size.

Does this have to be done manually now?

I have reindexed two folders of email messages, using Thunderbird, including deleting the global sqlite db and rebuilding, but I still cannot get Thunderbird to successfully reindex these very large files of email messages, 1 is over 4 gigabytes in size. Does this have to be done manually now?

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I see you're on Win XP. If it's the 32-bit version, you may be experiencing the limitation of 4GB files in a FAT32 file system.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Limits_(Thunderbird)#Folders_and_messages

I'm not sure re-indexing will help recover lost emails, but there are ways to recover deleted messages. Perhaps you should split the large folder into 2 or more folders.