glennmgray
asked on
Thunderbird Inbox full - many emails missing
A user got the error message that his inbox was full and he couldn't receive any more mail. I checked the mail folder and the inbox was listed at 4.2gb (he gets a lot of mail with a lot of attachments). The # of emails in the inbox was 3500. I compacted the folders, which understandably took a long time. When it was done the inbox was still full and still listed at 4.2gb.
He was running Thunderbird 2 so I downloaded and installed thunderbird 3. Upon starting thunderbird 3 for the first time it indexed all the folders. When it was done the inbox was still full but there were only 1800 emails in the inbox! Everything after mid-September had disappeared. I tried deleting the inbox.msf file but no luck. I renamed the inbox to oldinbox and it recreated the inbox when I next started the program and he is now able to get new email, but he still can't get at the missing emails in the oldinbox.
I moved all the visible emails from the oldinbox to new folders and re-compacted but the missing emails are still missing and the size of oldinbox is still 4.2gb. Any ideas on how to get the missing emails?
He was running Thunderbird 2 so I downloaded and installed thunderbird 3. Upon starting thunderbird 3 for the first time it indexed all the folders. When it was done the inbox was still full but there were only 1800 emails in the inbox! Everything after mid-September had disappeared. I tried deleting the inbox.msf file but no luck. I renamed the inbox to oldinbox and it recreated the inbox when I next started the program and he is now able to get new email, but he still can't get at the missing emails in the oldinbox.
I moved all the visible emails from the oldinbox to new folders and re-compacted but the missing emails are still missing and the size of oldinbox is still 4.2gb. Any ideas on how to get the missing emails?
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I'm speaking about Thunderbird 3.
ASKER
Sorry I forgot to mention that it is a POP3 account. I tried to copy the oldinbox file to our fileserver so that I could try accessing it on my laptop which is running Thunderbird 2 but got an error message after copying about 80% of the file: "cannot copy oldinbox: data error (cyclic redundancy check)".
Is there any way to fix the file or is it hopeless?
Is there any way to fix the file or is it hopeless?
SOLUTION
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Here you go. Hope it helps.
https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/24977939/Thunderbird-Inbox-Problem-TOO-BIG.html
https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/24977939/Thunderbird-Inbox-Problem-TOO-BIG.html
ASKER
The file was too badly corrupted to copy. I ended up restoring all the emails the user received since September. Thanks for the effort.