Missing email and folders in Thunderbird after restoring profile.
I had synced a few of my Gmail accounts to Thunderbird to view all my email offline. All the accounts had been working fine for over a month. (I created separate profiles for each gmail account)
Recently I had to reinstall windows. Before reinstalling I backed up my Thunderbird profiles.
With the fresh windows install done I tried to reinstall Thunderbird and restore my profiles. This is what happens:
1. Thunderbird launches with information from the restored profile without any problem. At start up I can see all the email (along with the folder tree). Now if I try to view any email then I can see it in the preview pane. But I am able to do this "only once". Immediately after this none of the email body shows up in the preview pane (or if I double click on the respective header). In fact the original mail which had shown successfully in the preview pane also fails to show the body content. Effectively, none of the email opens up.
2. I next tried searching for emails and they show up in the search results (showing the top 2-3 lines from the respective email body). However, here again when I double click on any of the emails the body does not show up.
3. I shut Thunderbird and tried restarting it. This time round the entire folder tree from the Gmail account went missing. None of the folders are there any more. I tried searching for the emails and this time I get the same result as in #2 above. Meaning, the emails show up in the search but the content does not show when I double click.
4. Also, I compared the size of the profile folder before restoring it and after I have opened it in Thunderbird a few times. Along with the missing emails there is a drastic reduction in size of the folder too. For eg. with one of the profile folder the size went down to about 222 MB from 619 MB.
I have been trying to read through the forums hoping to find a fix but nothing seems to work.
Am currently on Thunderbird 31.7. I have tried using an older version of Thunderbird (31.0) but it hasn't worked. My OS is Windows 7.
Can someone please look into this and advise ?
Thanks
PJ
All Replies (4)
Just upgraded to Thunderbird ver 38. The problem is still persisting.
Can someone please help.
You have used the word "profiles" in a slightly odd way, so first of all I'd want to make sure I understand what you mean when you say "profile". Then we can move on to what you did when you backed up your profile(s).
Most of us don't need any more than one profile, and I view running with multiple profiles as a somewhat high risk and complicated matter, and not something any mainstream user should need to get into.
Gmail is pretty much always done "in the cloud" via IMAP so there doesn't need to be much in a profile in Thunderbird; your messages will, when all is well, be downloaded from the server anyway.
Zenos said
You have used the word "profiles" in a slightly odd way, so first of all I'd want to make sure I understand what you mean when you say "profile". Then we can move on to what you did when you backed up your profile(s). Most of us don't need any more than one profile, and I view running with multiple profiles as a somewhat high risk and complicated matter, and not something any mainstream user should need to get into. Gmail is pretty much always done "in the cloud" via IMAP so there doesn't need to be much in a profile in Thunderbird; your messages will, when all is well, be downloaded from the server anyway.
Am referring to the profile creation process which is accessed by typing:
"thunderbird.exe -p" in the Run command line on windows.
It is perfectly normal for multiple users to be using thunderbird on the same PC to manage their emails. In that case creating unique profiles for each user is quite normal (am not sure why you are finding it odd).
When I say I backed up my profile, I simply made a copy of the respective folder which contains all the files in relation to my thunderbird profile. Please see this link for more details:
Modified by PJ73
I have tried restoring the profile using MozBackup but the problem persists.
When prompted by Moz I chose only to restore the emails leaving out the other stuff like address book, cookies, history.
But the mail and folders are still disappearing as described in the original post.
Can someone please help ?