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glennmgray

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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?
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I'm speaking about Thunderbird 3.
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glennmgray

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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?
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The file was too badly corrupted to copy.  I ended up restoring all the emails the user received since September.  Thanks for the effort.