Does Thunderbird delete messages from an IMAP Gmail account if you've deleted those messages in Gmail? Will it "echo" this deletion?
I've run out of free storage space in my Gmail account, and have realised that storing all my messages on web mail is not ideal anyway. I have over 80k messages going back to 2007, and having this searchable archive has been very useful many times.
The plan was to download Thunderbird and migrate all messages offline, then delete most from my online Gmail account knowing that they were still safely stored offline in Thunderbird. Well, I just deleted 60K messages from Gmail, and now it seems Thunderbird has synched with that deletion and deleted them from my offline archive too. This is kind of a catastrophe for me. Is there any way to retrieve these deleted emails and prevent this from happening in the future? Can I un-synch the delete action between Gmail and Thunderbird (so that I can delete messages from Gmail after synching with Thunderbird to ensure there is still a copy offline)?
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IMAP is synchronised. IT is something that is raised in this forum on a daily bases because folks assume mail is mail. It is not.
If you are making an offline store you need POP and you then only get what is in your inbox and only after the time to set in Googles user interface when you enable POP and less secure apps.
Ugh. Ok, thanks. This was totally not clear to me. Do you know if there's any way to retrieve the deleted messages??
Have they been deleted from the all mail folder?
There is no "All Mail" folder, but I can't see them in any visible folder on Thunderbird.
There is no "All Mail" folder,
Login to your account via webmail. There will be an 'All Mail' folder.
Log into my Thunderbird account via webmail? I don't understand - Thunderbird has a webmail option?
If you mean my Gmail webmail, the emails are definitely not there, as I deleted them all (and emptied the trash). They are gone from Gmail for good, hence hoping there's some way to recover them from Thunderbird.
Did you create a backup of your Thunderbird profile folder prior to deleting the messages?
Did you compact folders after deleting those messages, or has automatic compacting been triggered since?
I did neither of those things - at least not knowingly.
I did all of the deleting of emails in Gmail. There is no backup or compacting option. It's just "delete message" -> "empty trash".
None of this sounds promising.
christ1 said
There is no "All Mail" folder,Login to your account via webmail. There will be an 'All Mail' folder.
Oh - sorry. Duh, yeah, now I see the "All Mail" folder in Gmail. It was hidden. They're definitely not in there - message count is 30k on both Gmail and Thunderbird - should be over 80k.
About compacting: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Compacting_folders
If compacting didn't happen yet your messages may still exist in Thunderbird, but they'd be sort of hidden.
First of all create a full backup of the Thunderbird profile. https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data#w_backing-up-a-profile
Then check with a decent text editor (not Notepad) whether your messages still exist in the Thunderbird mail file(s). Mail files are the ones holding your messages, and don't have a file extension. They are plain text.