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After a power failure, all the messages (or what appears to be all of then, 5K+) were in the inbox marked unread and all the folders were gone. HELP!!!

  • 3 tontu
  • 2 am na jafe-jafe bii
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  • i mujjee tontu mooy Matt

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A long power failure shut down my wife's system without shutting down Windows. When she started it, all her email messages were in her Inbox and marked unread. She previously had 25 or 30 folders; they're all gone. This is an IMAP account synced with Gmail. When I looked at the profile folder with Windows Explorer, only a few of the folder files (including .MSF) were there; the rest of the folders were listed as files, not folders (both the no-extension and .MSF files for each). Oddly enough, all the folders seem to be in the POP3 folder, but it isn't a POP3 account. This is a major major problem. Please help me solve it.

A long power failure shut down my wife's system without shutting down Windows. When she started it, all her email messages were in her Inbox and marked unread. She previously had 25 or 30 folders; they're all gone. This is an IMAP account synced with Gmail. When I looked at the profile folder with Windows Explorer, only a few of the folder files (including .MSF) were there; the rest of the folders were listed as files, not folders (both the no-extension and .MSF files for each). Oddly enough, all the folders seem to be in the POP3 folder, but it isn't a POP3 account. This is a major major problem. Please help me solve it.

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If it is an imap account, simply delete the account from Thunderbird and set it up again, all the folders will download from the server and sync up.

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Thank you for such a prompt reply, Matt. I don't think that would work (although I'm not sure) because the folders don't exist on the Gmail server, just on her computer (and our backup hard drive). We use Gmail so we can get our mail when we're traveling, but don't store any messages there. We save them in folders on our home systems and delete them from the Gmail server. I hope against hope that there is some way I can recover her folders; she's really upset by this, email is mostly what she uses the system for to keep in contact with our children and her siblings. I'm going to copy the entire profile folder to a thumb drive because the backup software will overwrite the current files on the backup hard drive at 0300 tomorrow. It sounds like I'm not likely to find a simple solution to this, but I hope those with more (much more) knowledge than I possess can show me that I'm wrong and it can be solved.

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Ok so your earlier comments now make more sense.

Before you restore from backup, which will likely loose some data, try deleting the foldertree.json file from your profile and see if that helps.

CLose Thunderbird before deleting files first of course.