Thunderbird Missing Deleted Emails

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Good morning! Here’s a question for you Thunderbird pros!

I am running TB v 68.12.0 on my Win 10 Pro V 20H2 laptop. I have it set up with 2 separate email accounts, and both are set to POP3 since I want to be able to delete and change things locally, but not in the online accounts as I use two computers and don’t want something deleted from the servers until I have seen it on both.

All of my email – both my local ISP and Gmail, are sent through my ISP address, so all get delivered to my local email mailbox in TB, but I can choose which reply to email address I use when sending. I never poll Gmail directly, but email sent “From” that address, is saved in my Gmail account sent folder in TB as well as in Gmail online. Maybe more info that needed, but that’s the set-up.

I recently noticed that email that was sent to the Gmail address and downloaded into the local ISP TB folder, and THEN deleted, disappears. It is not showing in either Trash folder, and actually should only be in the local ISP Trash, since nothing is downloaded into the Gmail mailboxes.

It seems that sometimes deleting an email deletes it permanently, and it isn’t anywhere within TB. I thought that I could perhaps there was a way to set it so that all Trash goes into the local ISP folder and isn’t lost somehow?

It doesn’t seem to happen all of the time, but for some reason, occasionally when I go back to look for a deleted email – it is just gone, and I am pretty sure that I didn’t do anything to permanently delete it – just moved it to the trash.

Any ideas on what might be happening or how to prevent it will be appreciated!

Thanks!

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Which trash do you expect it to go to, the one in TB?

The TB trash is a compilation of all your accounts. Try expanding it to see if the messages are in a sub folder.

Pressing Shift Del will send it straight to the ether and bypass the trash.

Do you empty the trash on exit?

cheers, Paul

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Hi Paul,

Actually, I expect it to go into the local ISP trash – that’s where they all go, since the gmails are all forwarded to the local ISP from gmail, and then downloaded, so in effect they are all “local”. So they all should go into that trash and nothing goes into the gmail trash. The gmail account is just set up so that I can email “from” the gmail address without actually needing to go to gmail. And it is actually my husband’s laptop, so he’s been noticing these disappearing emails too.

Paul T wrote:

The TB trash is a compilation of all your accounts. Try expanding it to see if the messages are in a sub folder.

There’s no expansion for the trash folder.

Paul T wrote:

Pressing Shift Del will send it straight to the ether and bypass the trash.

Yes, I do realize that, but we don’t do that. Typically this is what my husband does – he looks at all of the email that has come into the Inbox, highlights and deletes those he doesn’t want (just delete, not Shift Del) and then opens the others, reads them and deletes ones he is done with.

But he sometimes does highlight a group and delete them all at once, unopened – right click/delete, I believe. Is that the same as Shift Del? Could that be where the issue is coming from – does deleting a group cause them to vanish?

Paul T wrote:

Do you empty the trash on exit?

No – it stays there till I do manually delete from the trash.

A bit confusing, I know, but it has worked well until recently when deleted emails started just disappearing.

Thanks for the ideas – guess I’ll need to fiddle with it a bit more.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ETA: Just tested it and highlighting a group with shift and then right clicking delete does delete them – they are in trash – not vanished, so that isn’t it.

 

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The following is from TB 78, which I think is similar to your 68.

Settings to double-check. And a possible retrieval.

Check these:
Tools > Options > General > [near bottom] Disk Space
Tools > Account Settings > [account] > Disk Space

Retrieval.

0. Do NOT Compact any email folder that may have any missing email.
1. All emails in each TB email folder are stored in a distinct Windows file. There may be subfolders too.
2. Where to find that Windows file? The easiest way is:
Tools > Account Settings > [account] > Server Settings > [bottom of panel] Local Directory:
Do not click Browse here! But,
Rt-click > Select All (this will highlight the entire line)
Rt-click > Copy
Open an Explorer window.
In the very top line, where it shows which file or folder you are displaying,
Click, then Rt-click > Paste. Enter
There are two files for each email folder:
– File, which contains the emails
– MSF File, which is an indexing file; ignore it for now.
3. Using Notepad or WordPad, Open a mail file (Sent, Trash, wherever you want to look).
4. Within each email, very near the top, are two ‘status’ lines maintained by TB.
X-Mozilla-Status:
X-Mozilla-Status2:
You will be looking at values in X-Mozilla-Status:, not Status2:.
5. Here are some values and meanings: (there are other digits also, which indicate the Reply and Forward status, among other things)
X-Mozilla-Status: 0000 – unread
0001 – read
0009 – read and deleted
6. Using Find (Ctrl+F), specify something that you know about the email that is missing: subject, date, some text within it, …; locate the email.
7. Change the last digit (only) in the Status from ‘9’ to ‘0’; this marks it as Unread. File.
8. Back in TB again:
Rt-click (on the mail folder that you changed) > Properties > [button] Repair Folder.
This corrects the .MSF (index) file to align with the actual (un-read) email status.

If you HAVE compacted an email folder, then the Windows FILE that ‘is’ it is now a DELeted file. This file then will have to be undeleted, and more complex handling is needed.
One such undelete program is Recuva.

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LHiggins

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Note (perhaps confusingly) also:
An email that has been deleted does not show in its ‘original’ email folder.
Physically it is there, but flagged as deleted, so it is not displayed.

This also holds true for an email that is in Trash, it can be ‘deleted’ from Trash and will not show up there. It still physically is there, but as it is flagged as deleted it is not displayed. (There is no Trash folder for Trash.) This ‘doubly-deleted’ email still can be retrieved by changing the Status flag.

Note that after an email is deleted, it still is possible to recover (undelete) it:
Edit > Undo Delete Message (Ctrl+Z).
This is because physically the email still is present, only the flag has been changed. It will disappear (not be displayed, although still there physically) from Trash and reappear in its original folder. (Under the covers, TB actually is copying emails and flying flags.)

Because of all the copying and flagging that is occurring, it is entirely possible that an email exists multiple times in multiple places, with varying flag settings. It CAN get confusing.

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LHiggins

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Hi PaulK!

Wow – thanks so much for all of this info. I think I need to print it out and spend some time working through all of your steps! Much appreciated. I’ll post back with what I discover and questions.

Wonder why it does that sometimes, though? Something to keep an eye on.

Thanks again!

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OK – I went through these steps up to searching the Word Pad file. It took quite a while to create the WordPad file, and I really couldn’t search it. The Find function kept timing out, and I believe that the file was just too large.

I think I’ll first need to actually delete many very old trash emails and then try again.

As to the size of the Trash folder – mine doesn’t show any size as in your image – I’ll poke around again and see if I can find it.

Thanks again for the detailed suggestions. Hopefully I can locate the one missing email that I am interested in, but my bigger concern is actually what causes some to just vanish. Maybe that Trash folder size.

More to work on – but thanks again!

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What is the size of your Trash folder? Is it reasonable considering the number of emails that (allegedly) are there?

I intentionally loaded some emails into a Trash folder.

Then: Rt-click, Select All (Ctrl+A); tapped the Delete key (NOT Empty Trash)

Clicked Delete.

They’re gone: the right panel is empty. Gone. Really? What’s taking that space?

Using an editor that I have, (went to the file location) and for all the emails I changed the 4th digit of [X-Mozilla-Status:] to 0 (zero), and Saved the file.

Came back to TB, and all the emails are back, and show up as New.

Another note: Previous post (earlier) documented that the 4th digit would be a ‘9’. In this experiment there were some emails that had a ‘3’ or a ‘b’. (All these digits actually are hexadecimal.) I ignored that and changed them also to ‘0’.

Is it possible that someone was reviewing, in the Trash folder, an email that had been deleted, and forgetting that Trash was the residence, inadvertently Deleted it again?

Use caution when Deleting – from within Trash – an email. In my experimentation here I did discover one sequence that did in fact actually irretrievably delete emails from Trash. You are unlikely to encounter that. (I hope.)

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LHiggins

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I noticed a similar problem several iterations ago-don’t recall the build #- I would occasionally save things in the local folders -after an update, everything in all of the LOCAL folders was GONE. I always check before updating and if there is anything I want, I copy the folders to the main database(?)

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LHiggins

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LHiggins wrote:

As to the size of the Trash folder – mine doesn’t show any size as in your image

To get this heading information:
1. View > Layout > Folder Pane Columns – – [check]
2. Click on the little pull-down
There are three values that can be displayed, individually or together. Experiment.
You may have to adjust the left pane size.

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LHiggins

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LHiggins wrote:

I think I’ll first need to actually delete many very old trash emails and then try again.

Be careful here. Remember – just deleting emails doesn’t actually remove them from the file, only the Status flags are changed. A Compact is necessary to shrink a mail folder file. But if you Compact, your ‘missing’ emails also may be eliminated.
Don’t Compact until you have established that the missing emails truly are gone.

Your missing emails MAY exist in both their original email folder and in Trash.

Oversize mail folders can be a problem to deal with. I suggest that you first use Explorer to get the ‘real’ file sizes – of all your mail folders – and then plan what to do.

Please post back the file sizes of the files that you want to examine – Inbox? Sent? Trash? some_others?

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LHiggins

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Hi Paul,

I DMed you with some additional details.

The size of the Trash folder is 1.49 GB – really huge, so that may be part of the problem.

I’ll check the DM later for more, or post back here!

Thanks!!

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Please do not DM questions. If you can’t write it in public, don’t write it.
See rule 12: Posts and Privacy @ AskWoody

cheers, Paul

 

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Thanks Paul for the reminder.

But in this instance I contacted LHiggins. I had started to post a reply here, but it grew to be too long and detailed to be (in my judgment) appropriate. So I transcribed it into a DM and sent it. We have had a short DM exchange on the matter.

Most of my postings are public.

In accordance with this – how do you suggest that one locate, in a 1.49 GB mail file, a specific email that hopefully is still there, but that has been flagged as Deleted? LHiggins has reported that Notepad can’t handle this large a file, and that WordPad also chokes attempting to do a Find. This is on Win 7. Search criterion is / criteria are – available.

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LHiggins

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PaulK wrote:

how do you suggest that one locate, in a 1.49 GB mail file

Notepad++ is the answer. I’ve not found a file too large yet.

cheers, Paul

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PaulK

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Ah yes. I keep forgetting that this is frequently endorsed here. Thank you.

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I’m interested in this discussion, because I am using Thunderbird 78.13.0 (latest update) and keep emptying regularly the “Trash” (the deleted emails end up not in the local, but in the “Trash” folder in the same section as the inbox). When I right click (sort of, mine is a Mac) on the “Trash” folder I get a drop down menu that includes the option to delete the Trash contents. I click on “YES” (hard to see compared to “NO” that is quite visible, by the way, as if TB did not like people doing it) and all the files in “Trash” vanish.

Question: are they really gone, deleted, are no more, or are they lurking somewhere and still taking disk space? I am asking, because I have started using TB less than two weeks ago, so I am a newby on this, and what I have been reading here leaves me feeling a little uneasy about such a possibility. I would not be surprised if there was a problem like that, because in the short time I been using it, I have already found some annoying problems when running TB. Luckily, after looking around and trying this and that, have discovered solutions to, or workarounds for them.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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The deleted items are not gone (just not visible) until you compact the database. Right click on the Trash folder – it’s one of the choices in the menu.
Same for the deleted items in the other folders.

Also “Compact” under “File” in the top menu. You can compact all of them at once.

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PK, Do I read you correctly?  Clicking YES to “Empty Trash” does not actually erase what is there, just turns it invisible? I had thought that if one chooses to empty the “Trash” folder, one means to get rid of everything that is in there, in a final, irreversible way. Now, if one opens the “Trash” folder and simply clicks on items there and hits “delete”  on the keyboard (something I never do), that might not really delete them, but make them invisible; if so, that’s a different issue. I have thought that “Empty Trash” meant “throw away the trash, I don’t want it on my computer.” Very odd it is not like that.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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Trash in TB is a database file, as are all mail folders.
Database files are not modified when you delete records, the internal indexes are. This is much more efficient than rewriting a whole file.
Compacting a database rewrites the whole file and is best done at low use times / not at all on a heavily used database.

cheers, Paul

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wavy

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I think there are two separate problems here:

1. The compaction problem, which has been addressed above; and
2. Setting your Trash settings to empty emails from the trash bin after a certain age, which hasn’t been discussed.

So I think it’s a combination of both.  I think your Trash settings are removing emails from the Trash after a certain age, AND probably the folder has also been compacted to permanently eliminate them from the database.

I’ve turned off compaction AND set Trash so I have to manually force the Trash can to be emptied.  I’ll do a manual compaction once in a while when I know it’s safe.

This is all stuff that I learned after I accidentally moved a ton of archive emails to Trash (where they were all visibly nuked because they were more than 30 days old) and then there was a compaction done which really eliminated them.

 

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