Disappearing mail

There are a variety of reasons that some or all of your messages might disappear from view in Thunderbird. Below are some things that you can try in order to get them back.

Part I

Situation: Thunderbird is running but you can't figure out where some of your messages went or why they can't be viewed. Below are the first things you should try.

• Check to make sure that View > Messages is set to "All".

• Look in the Junk and Trash folders. Depending on how you have the Junk Mail Controls set up, messages can be sent automatically to the Junk folder or Trash.

• If you have set up message filters, some of your incoming messages might be getting sent to folders other than the Inbox. Check your filter definitions (Tools > Message Filters...).

• Check to see if your anti-virus software has quarantined or deleted your inbox. Your anti-virus software might be set to do this automatically when it finds an infected message. [1][2]

• If your mail folders vanished because you deleted a mail account by clicking on the "Remove Account" button in Thunderbird, read this.

Part II

Situation: same as Part I, but the things listed in Part I did not solve the problem. Before proceding, look in your profile folder to see if your mail files are still there. If so, you can try some of the things listed below but first make a temporary backup copy of your profile folder.

• Try compacting folders for the affected account.

• It's possible that the .msf files (index files) are corrupted. Try going to your profile folder and deleting them. They will be rebuilt when Thunderbird starts up.

• If mail disappeared from the message list immediately after you renamed a mail folder or subfolder, try exiting Thunderbird and restarting. If that doesn't work, try exiting Thunderbird, going to your profile folder and renaming the corresponding mail file. [3]

• If mail fails to appear in Thunderbird after migrating: for each folder directory (xxx.sbd), make sure there is a corresponding mail file (xxx), even if there is no mail at that level. [4].

• In some situations, it's possible that messages have been marked for deletion but have not yet been erased from the mail file; they are simply hidden from display. To recover such messages, try what's described in this thread. (If you have already compacted folders, you will need to try this using the mail files from the temporary backup of your profile.)

Part III

Situation: you launch Thunderbird and the Account Wizard pops up. It seems that all of your accounts and account information have vanished.

• It's possible that Thunderbird somehow "forgot" the location of your profile and created a new, blank one for you. Exit Thunderbird and launch the Profile Manager. You might be able to launch Thunderbird with your old profile by using the profile manager. If this doesn't work, you might be able to get Thunderbird to locate your profile by going to the profiles.ini file (located a level or two "up" in the directory hierarchy from the profile folder), opening it with a text editor such as Notepad, and correcting the line for Path if it seems to be incorrect.

• It's possible that your prefs.js file, which contains your account settings, got corrupted. (See this example.) Exit Thunderbird, go to your profile folder, make a temporary backup copy of prefs.js, and then replace the prefs.js in your profile folder with a copy of prefs.js from the last backup you made of your profile. If you made your last backup using the MozBackup utility, you can get the backed-up prefs.js by unzipping the .pcv backup file as described here (see "Problems restoring with MozBackup?" section). If you do not have a backup copy of prefs.js and if your profile folder contains a prefs.bak file, you can try renaming prefs.bak to prefs.js.

• If your profile exists and seems to be intact but cannot be "found" by the profile manager, exit Thunderbird and launch the Profile Manager. Make a new profile and migrate everything over from your old profile folder to the new one.
  Note: if the problem is in fact a corrupt prefs.js file, migrating the profile will not help since this does not fix the bad prefs.js file. In this case, see here for further information on how to restore your mail and address books.

If all else fails, try a Mozillazine forum search for terms like "disappeared" or "vanished".