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Random missing emails in Thunderbird

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  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by Montrealer

Montrealer
Montrealer
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Problem: Occasionally I need to refer to emails from a few weeks ago, or a few years ago, and once in a while I can't find the email I'm looking for. These are emails I know to exist (from a print-out, or from quoted material in another email), but they no longer appear in my Inbox or any of my local boxes.

I do not have whole months or years of missing emails, just random emails here and there that I can no longer find. They're not in Trash, not Archived -- just not there any more.

Any idea what might be happening here?

Using Thunderbird for Mac, 68.12.0, on a 2020 iMac running Catalina 10.15.6, as well as a 2018 MacBook (and also using Apple Mail on an iPhone).

Problem: Occasionally I need to refer to emails from a few weeks ago, or a few years ago, and once in a while I can't find the email I'm looking for. These are emails I know to exist (from a print-out, or from quoted material in another email), but they no longer appear in my Inbox or any of my local boxes. I do not have whole months or years of missing emails, just random emails here and there that I can no longer find. They're not in Trash, not Archived -- just not there any more. Any idea what might be happening here? Using Thunderbird for Mac, 68.12.0, on a 2020 iMac running Catalina 10.15.6, as well as a 2018 MacBook (and also using Apple Mail on an iPhone).

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Montrealer
Montrealer Question owner
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I have just discovered that when an email is open and I hit "Delete", that email is deleted -- bypassing the Trash, as if I had hit "Shift+Delete" -- the open email disappears permanently with no way to bring it back!

This is a terrible idea. First, I want TB to warn me before I delete an email -- "Are you sure you want to do that?". Secondly, why would it delete anything without allowing me to Undo it? Again, it should at least warn me, "This action cannot be Undone."

What if I hit "Delete" by accident? What if I thought I was in a Write window, but actually viewing an incoming email that I did not intend to delete? (This is what happened to me today.) Now an important incoming email is gone, permanently, with no way to bring it back.

I have installed TB 78.3.2, hoping that this problem might be fixed -- but no, it's still there.

I should never be able to delete an email forever, unrecoverably, with a single-key command. Is there any way to turn off this badly designed behavior?

(I installed "TBkeys-lite", but it does not disable this function.)

Modified by Montrealer