The open-source email program Thunderbird has been my favorite email client since it came out in a stable version.
I have always stayed current with updates.
Yesterday the dang thing ate my emails…almost all of them, thousands in fact.
They have proven to be unrecoverable.
Checking the forums and their knowledgebase only yielded the knowledge that I am one of many many users of Thunderbird that this has happened to. The official answer from Mozilla seems to boil down to “Yes, that can happen.”
Therefore, if you are one of the people that I have recommended Thunderbird to in the past, I sincerely apologize, and I hope you haven’t lost data.
I recommend anyone using the Thunderbird email client to seek other alternatives; also, you should immediately back up your data.
Also, if anyone reading this has emailed me recently and I haven’t responded, now you know why. Please email me again and I will respond.
Mozilla stuff seems to keep profile data files open, so if you hard-crash the machine, your profile gets corrupted. This can cause lost bookmarks, etc.
why they keep that file open is beyond me…that may be SOP in the linux world, but in Windows we learned a long time ago that any time you need to write to a data file, you should open it, write it, and close it as quickly as possible.
I do have backups of the data, but cannot restore as the problem immediately recreates itself.
I have also attempted to create a new profile and move the data over, which fails.
On researching this online, I have found that I am just one of many people who have recently experienced this with Thunderbird. There doesnt’ seem to be a working solution. Worse is that there appears to be no plan in place to produce a solution at this time.
Thus, I will no longer use Thunderbird and no longer recommend it.
James, I only use Thunderbird with an IMAP server, so I don’t have any experience using it with local files. But, I believe their use a simple mbox file format to store the messages in. So it’s likely you can restore your data and then use some other mail program to either import your messages or use a perl script to convert the mbox file into something else.
Ouch!
I feel for ya!
I’m maintaining over 4,000 e-mail messages on Netscape now… and I don’t wish to change. I constantly refer to many of my old messages for reference and it would be traumatic to loose them.
I had major problems about 2 years ago, after I used System Mechanic for maintenance. It wiped out all my bookmarks and disconnected Netscape as my e-mail client.
I was able to reconnect things but it seems to get stuck when deleting files. Sometimes I’m forced to exit Netscape and compress the files to use them again.
At some point in time I will build/purchase an new computer and attempt a fresh installation of Netscape… less the 4,000 messages.
I’ll have to figure out a way to archive the old files and still access them as needed.
I used to save every email I’d ever gotten about my website…there were several thousand. A couple of months ago, I pruned it back to the last two years only.
I’ve had that happen. These days I’m diligently trying to compact my database, whenever I think of it.
The first time this occurred, I managed to restore everything by loading the newest version of T-bird–it managed to make sense of the corrupted data that was confusing the earlier version. The second time it happened (on a different computer) the data was unrecoverable. I started compacting my data then. Before this, I’d had no idea that the dbase was that fragile. It appears to be some ordinary database format–I forget which, but at the time I managed to work it out.
You might be able to suck your data into some other dbase software and sort out the corruption there, and then export it cleaned up, if you have a base of understanding of relational database principles.
The files appear to be plain text ASCII flat files with a separate index and pointer file.
The original file shows extensive corruption. Unfortunately, so does the file on the backup.
Oh well–in the grand scheme of things this classes more as an annoyance than a real problem. However, I will certainly no longer recommend Thunderbird to other users.
I am still a great fan of open source software–just not of this particular client anymore.
I use thunderbird - primarily on linux - no issues yet. But the mailbox format has always disturbed me.
Sylpheed is another open source E-mail program. Its interface is not as refined as Thunderbird, but I have used it on and off for a couple of years. One big advantage is that mail messages are saved in ‘mh’ format. Basically a directory of individual text files for each message. No cryptic proprietary format to dig through.
I’ve been using TB on Windows XP since version 0.8 with no problems.
However, I take real care to follow Mozilla’s instructions when upgrading - ie. uninstall the old version first before installing new version - and I always backup the mail folders and the mail itself into another location on the hard drive before installation. I have not needed to use the backup files, though, and just delete them after making sure the new version of TB has been installed properly.
