Thunderbird = teh suck

BobSutan

BobSutan

[H]F Junkie
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I never thought I'd say this, but there's a Mozilla product that Microsoft totally owned. As of this moment Thunderbird is officially on my shit list.

After XP took a dump on me last month I thought I'd give Thunderbird a shot as my email client of choice. After not even a month the damn thing went tits up and I lost everything-- about 4 years worth of email. Gone.

I'm currently looking at options to recover the lost email, but so far it's not looking good. When I got home from work I had to hit the reset switch and when the OS came back up it lost all of my accounts, rules, address book, the works. Not a gods damn fracking thing was in the email client.
 
Obviously the first rule of recovery is: stop using that machine/hard drive. :) You know all this, most likely. It's not the end of the world if you take every precaution to recover the data at this moment and from now on till it's recovered but using that machine/hard drive is simply out of the question...

There's a bunch of data recovery threads here of late with recommendations. TestDisk is free open source data recovery software that I've had great success with since finding it last year. Commercial solutions are EasyRecovery, R-Studio, and some others but you'll pay for it.

And if "pro" data recovery is necessary well, then the price really goes up.

Good luck, regardless...
 
Well, this seems to be more a flaw with Thunderbird when using the profile name of "default". I used the command-line profile manager to change the name, readded my accounts, and installed a couple add-ons that are said to fix this. One is a email compacting tool and the other is an import/export tool. I'm importing all my previous email as I write this and once that's complete I'll compact it and go from there. It's just slow as hell. Almost 6GB of email and I need to import every folder individually, even with the bulk import option--have to select "yes" for every folder it finds if I want it imported..
 
A free solution is Recuva, it specifically looks for personal files, though I'm not sure how well it picks up emails...
 
There is a tool that is used to import Thunderbird mail to Outlook via converting it to Outlook Express format first. Once you get them into Outlook, you can either import them back to Thunderbird or just keep using Outlook.

The program is called IMAPSize: http://www.broobles.com/imapsize/

Follow the instructions on this page http://www.broobles.com/imapsize/th2outlook.php

Hopefully, this will at least recover them to a format that you will be able to do something with.

Oh, and I would probably do try this on a back up of your mailbox files.. just in case.

Good Luck.
 
If the hard drive wasn't destroyed, the data still exists in a readable format.
 
Bob, I'm with you. I went through the same exact thing a couple years ago, and did the TB > OE > Outlook, and was successful in my recovery.

The issue with TB is that you have to periodically compact the mail, or when your mail file gets that large, you're screwed. But not beyond repair...

I also used the conversion tool that converts the TB mail files into DBX files. Then you import them into OE, and then you can transfer OE to Outlook. I forget which part is monotonous, but I recall having to go through each folder to clean something up at the end of it all. But at least you can recover from this.

I'm AFH right now, but if you want, when I'm back in a couple days I can hook you up with the tool that I used, as it's on my external HD in my office.

F TBird...
 
I've never had this issue even sharing a Thunderbird setup across several computers. Just save off all your files from your Thunderbird profile directory, and in the event of a critical failure, copy the profile folder back. Either adjust the Thunderbird profiles list to include the old profile name, or create a new profile and change the backup folder's name to the new one. I've never "lost" anything doing this, so I can't imagine it's a problem inherent in Thunderbird, only a profile/naming problem.

That's why I use and love Thunderbird. It's the only email client I've used that supported multiple accounts AND stores everything in one easy-to-copy place, and never complains when I do a restore simply by copying back an old profile (with the right folder name).

(I also don't use IMAP because it's way, way easier to do backups locally than remotely. And, I have issues with having many years of sensitive emails just sitting on a public server waiting for some bored 14 year old to hack into.)
 
Everything(one) sucks when you don't BACKUP eh? :rolleyes:

Been using MozBackup for a while...........works great, and saved me once already from a dying HDD.
 
I've been using Thunderbird Portable on a USB stick for over a year now... still using default profile, manages about 10 email accounts.

Never had a single problem with it. Sucks that you lost your email, but hopefully it will be recovered.
 
Chances are that your data is not deleted or lost at all. I've dealt with several W2k and XP machines that had "lost" a good amount of user-data after performing a regular reboot.

Just check the "documents and settings" folder. There should be only one folder named after you logon-name. If you're experiencing the same issue, there'll be one folder "yourusername" and another one named like "yourusername.Computername". If that's true, windows is using the latter one when you logon, whereas your data is still stored inside the other one.

greetings,
redilS


//edit
Here's a short guideline on how to recover a "lost" user profile.

http://windowsitpro.com/article/art...-do-i-recovery-a-lost-local-user-profile.html
 
redilS said:
Chances are that your data is not deleted or lost at all. I've dealt with several W2k and XP machines that had "lost" a good amount of user-data after performing a regular reboot.

Just check the "documents and settings" folder. There should be only one folder named after you logon-name. If you're experiencing the same issue, there'll be one folder "yourusername" and another one named like "yourusername.Computername". If that's true, windows is using the latter one when you logon, whereas your data is still stored inside the other one.

greetings,
redilS


//edit
Here's a short guideline on how to recover a "lost" user profile.

http://windowsitpro.com/article/art...-do-i-recovery-a-lost-local-user-profile.html
Click to expand...


It's his Thunderbird profile that is corrupt.
 
Renamed the profile, imported all my old mail, and it seems to be working fine. Finally got it all sorted, deleted most of the junk, and compacted it. Still about about 12GB of email to go through though as some of the mail stores I imported were duplicate backups.
 
Most likely your e-mail profile got messed up.

Chances are all of your e-mails are still there, just not connecting with Thunderbird.

Check your Application Data folder --> Mozilla --> Thunderbird --> Profile.
 
Just wondering so don't flame me till I'm charbroiled but but but...

Why not back those emails up to some other type of media, like DVD, or... well, you know what I'm asking. I can't imagine keeping gig upon gig of old email stored on a hard drive, just seems a bit counterproductive to me in the long run. Once I've read it, I'd think that storing it safely someplace (hard drives aren't safe, period, as long as they're in operation) would be preferable to having all that in a situation where it could just up and disappear like a fart in the wind.

I'm just curious, mind you.
 
I recommend using IMAP. I just started using it a few days ago, and I don't know how I lived before IMAP.
 
I do have backups of the email on other drives, just in case. That's part of the problem though. It's like a full and differential getting conflated and having a mess of redundant data to sort through. Once I get it all sorted and the redundant stuff weeded out I'm making 2 good copies and storing them on separate systems and dated for when they were made.
 
There isn't any email program out there that will perform reliably well with 6GB stores. Even an Exchange server will start hitting a wall on mailbox performance when it has to deal with mailboxes of that size. Suggest splitting up your email into separate files.
 
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