Emails disappeared from server?!

[Grayfor]

I recently installed an email client (Thunderbird) to a new PC, and it seems to have deleted a large number of mails from the server. Also, when I look at sent mails on the web page it reports 486 mails when hovered over with the mouse, but only displays 19 "unread" messages - I cannot work out how to access these other messages.

In summary, I've lost years of important information and need to mitigate however I can.  BT are being singularly unhelpful, as the person with whom I spoke just said that "we don't support 3rd party applications" - the fact that I cannot access these on their own web portal would suggest that they should be a little more engaged...

Any ideas?

[licquorice]

Are the mail's still within Thunderbird on the new PC?

If so, I suspect you configured Thunderbird as POP3 rather than IMAP and didn't tuck the option to leave a copy of the mail on the server.

If the mails have been deleted from the server due to your actions, I fail to see how BT can 'be a little more engaged'.

[gg30340]

BT do not assist with third party email clients such as Thunderbird because they can not possibly know the working of every email client on the market over which they have no control nor can they mitigate for any error caused by the user when installing the email client.

If your emails have been deleted from the BT servers when you installed Thunderbird it means that they have been completely deleted and can not be recovered.

Without knowing fully what you did during the install of Thunderbird it is difficult to say for sure but I would agree you set it up as a POP3 account instead of an IMAP account and you did not tick the leave on server box.

Also if you have lost a lot of emails it would appear that you have been storing them in the Inbox rather than placing them in to folders. Had you done that the folder would not have been downloaded by a POP3 account and would still be on the server.

[Grayfor]

Thanks for the reply, the account was set up as IMAP, and only a certain sub account was seriously affected (although some messages from my main account have also gone) All settings were - and are - to keep mails on the server...

[Grayfor]

No, mails are not within Thunderbird and it's configured to IMAP, with all necessary options selected to keep mail on the server.
Can you explain the 486 mails which I cannot access, but show as being in the folder?

[gg30340]

Presumably the emails were on the server before you set up T'bird.

If there are a lot of emails and folders to synchronise it can take some considerable time so it may be that they will eventually show in T'bird.

[Grayfor]

Yep, all on server - but now they aren't (or don't appear to be...)

[gg30340]

Unless you have thousands of emails I would have expected it to have synchronised by now however give it until tomorrow and if no change we can see if anything further can be done to help.

[Andy_N]

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@Grayforwrote:

I recently installed an email client (Thunderbird) to a new PC, and it seems to have deleted a large number of mails from the server. Also, when I look at sent mails on the web page it reports 486 mails when hovered over with the mouse, but only displays 19 "unread" messages - I cannot work out how to access these other messages.

In summary, I've lost years of important information and need to mitigate however I can.  BT are being singularly unhelpful, as the person with whom I spoke just said that "we don't support 3rd party applications" - the fact that I cannot access these on their own web portal would suggest that they should be a little more engaged...

Any ideas?

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If you still have your old PC/Thunderbird installation, you should be able to see the old emails - as long as you don't connect that PC to the internet.

You can actually copy the old TB profile to the new computer (it might be very large) - but you need to do a tiny bit of work to enable the old profile name to be the default for the new PC/TB installation.

[Grayfor]

That's an interesting idea - the drive from my old PC is now installed in the new one as a slave so, in theory, any existing mail should be there (unless TB used the same path/folder), but I've no idea how I would access  the previous installation. I doubt that the program would run on the new machine, but maybe worth looking at.