ooops, i spoke too soon,

• i didn't pick up attachments for what was missing.

Also clarifications, i moved messages i could see to another folder eg InboxSave first, and

you may need to re-index afterwards.

wdseml files shouldn't be a worry; they are deliberately created to integrate with windows search.

e.g. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=1230495

However, it's a puzzle as to why they should appear in your mail folders in Thunderbird. They ought to be in mozmsgs folders.

In this case, they may well serve as a useful (if unintended) backup of messages that have been accidentally deleted.

Zenos, thanks for your comment. My terminology was wrong. When i referred to a mail folder, i meant mozmsgs. The folder hierarchy is Mail/Local folders/ etc down to /Inbox.mozmsgs and any sbd, the latter were unaffected.

see image

So at this stage what i am missing are any attachments for the date period, So are attachments stored in mozmsgs or somewhere else?

wdseml files are a partial representation of an EML file used to allow the exceedingly poor windows search to search your mail. They are not "your mail" and anything you do premised on that as being true is not going to go well.

Deleting global-messages sqlite deletes Thunderbirds internal search database for mail. It is in no way involved in the storage or display of mail. About the only time deleting that is worth the effort is when search results simply do not return mail you know is in there (Corruption in the index for whatever reason)

Finally all mail in a folders in Thunderbird is stored in a file in your user profile with the same name as the folder. So a folder inbox will be in a file called inbox. It will have a companion file inbox.msf. The inbox msf is an index of the content of the main file, and is used to generate most mail lists within the program. When this file is out of sync weird display of mail like html code appears. selecting repair from within Thunderbird forces a repair of this file be re reading the main mail file.

If a repair does not fix the issue you have corruption in the mail store file, or you may just have an empty file. When anti virus programs locate a virus in a 5 years old mail they use the rip and burn method of removing the entire inbox. so you click repair, their is no inbox so your mail appears to disappear because another program has whipped the whole mail store into Quarantine, or simply deleted it entirely.

So to use your analogy. in

Appdata\roaming\Thunderbird\profiles\[random string].[profile name usually default]\mail\local folders You will find inbox and inbox.MSF (Those are the inbox of local folders and it's accompanying index.)

Matt, thanks for the detail. I just sent myself 451kb worth of attachments and i can see the email, and click on the attachments but where are they kept? Inbox properties shows just 1kb.

ooops again...edit Sorry, i was looking in the wrong place. Inbox is showing 5261kb, but after i send another message with attachments of 451kb the size doesn't change. Anyway it looks like there is no way to get back the attachments, they were lost due to some corruption.

I would seriously suggest you ensure your anti virus program does not scan files in the Thunderbird profile. That is the number one cause of mail folder corruption. They quarantine the whole file/Folder.

Send is the Sent file, not the inbox file.

Matt, i sent it to myself so it ended up in the Inbox. My post read "I just sent myself 451kb worth of attachments" . i thought that was clear enough.

Today i repeated the exercise, moved it and the rest of the folder to and from a folder named InboxSave. Guess what, the attachments disappeared, again.

There was no quarantine action taken by the anti-virus program in this case (today's test) so it isn't the number one cause of that.

So, the number two cause of losing attachments is moving mail to another folder. I don't know what other circumstances might impinge, whether one or the other folder is compacted or not; or something else, ie a defrag has been performed and there are direct pointers which are lost, or some other combination, BUT.. There is a bug other than the "number one cause".

Thanks for the advice about the anti-virus program.

ok, I suggest you take an email message that contains attachments. Press Ctrl +U in thunderbird and you will see the message source. In a series os MIME documents in that text will be your attachments.

People almost universally assume they are sending files as attachments. The reality is a sleight of hand. EMail at it's inception was a text medium, and at it's heart it still is. That PDF file your attaching has to be converted to text before it can be a part of an email. This is called mime encoding and luckily is covered by an internet standard so most stuff is universal between mail clients. The result is your 500Kb file is converted to mime and in the process grows about 30-40% So when you ask questions like where are attachments stored, the answer is "in the body of the message"

The message view you get when you press Ctrl+U is not only the exact source of the message as transmitted over the internet it is an exact representation of the message if it was saved as an EML file.

Thunderbirds mbox files are simply a load of EML files stacked one after the other with a blank line at the end and a from line to start them. When Thunderbird is closed you can open them in a text editor and again see your mail in it's raw text representation.

So when you say the attachments were there, and then they were not, your saying that fundamentally the mime encoded text of a message has changed. Thunderbird does not go through some fancy editing process when you drag a message from one folder to another, it just copies a block of text to a new location, deletes it in the old location and pretends it moved something. If you said the message disappeared I would be all over it as a possible bug. Parts of it disappearing I simply don't understand as Thunderbird sees a message not some part of the message. Programs that go out of their way to see parts of a message even when stores as a mime encoded text file are anti virus programs, what programs are proud of the fact they insert themselves into every disk read and write. Again anti virus programs.

The following is a standard text used for diagnosing Thunderbird issues. Many challenge the validity, but using both Thunderbird's and the operating systems safe modes are the only ways to get rid of the all pervasive security software that is so often the cause of issues.

To diagnose problems with Thunderbird, try one of the following:

• Restart Thunderbird with add-ons disabled (Thunderbird Safe Mode). On the Help menu, click on "Restart with Add-ons Disabled". If Thunderbird works like normal, there is an Add-on or Theme interfering with normal operations. You will need to re-enable add-ons one at a time until you locate the offender.
• Restart the operating system in safe mode with Networking. This loads only the very basics needed to start your computer while enabling an Internet connection. Click on your operating system for instructions on how to start in safe mode: Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, OSX

If safe mode for the operating system fixes the issue, there's other software in your computer that's causing problems. Possibilities include but not limited to: AV scanning, virus/malware, background downloads such as program updates.