Can you help me report an issue in which 5 years of my emails were removed and deleted, I think by spam filter?
I reinstalled Windows 10. It removed Thunderbird. I reinstalled Thunderbird and re-linked my email account. (IMAP). I downloaded email. I keep many emails sorted in folders, but I also tend to leave personal email that don't have an obvious filing system in my inbox pretty much forever. So I have emails back to 2008. I turned on spam filtering because I get over 200 spam emails per day on this account. All the setting were still on default settings. Thunderbird began identifying every single email as spam and then locked up. I got script running on page errors. After several minutes I was forced to kill the program. When I restarted I did not try to run junk controls right away, but I found that 5 years of emails that had been in my inbox were just gone. 2011 - 2016. Not in junk, not in trash. Gone.
I have been trying to retrain the spam filter more carefully now for several weeks but it is still acting up. Today it has identified a few hundred emails as junk correctly, but will not move them to the junk folder. It has also taken 20 minutes sometimes to run the spam filter process and it locks up if I try to mess with things before its done. I still need to figure out how to recover my lost email from carbonite because the emails were completely deleted from the server. I am about ready to search for an alternative to Thunderbird. My questions are a) Is there anywhere else to report this nonsense to Mozilla? b) Why should I stick with Thunderbird?
All Replies (2)
You're using both of the words "Spam" and "Junk" and make mention of Thunderbird's "Spam filter".
We need to be clear about what exactly you mean by "Spam filter". Thunderbird uses the term "Junk" and it has built-in "Junk controls". If you have been working with anything where the word "Spam" appears then you need to look for a cause outside Thunderbird.
(This spam/junk difference is true for the English language version of Thunderbird; I don't know how or if such a distinction is made in other language variants.)
I would suggest you create a "miscellaneous" folder for the stuff that has no obvious home. I consider the Inbox a dangerous place to leave anything for an extended period. One of its dangers is that it specifically is operated upon by filters and junk controls. One you have moved messages out into their own folders they are not going to be filtered or classified unless you deliberately choose to do so.
Personally I couldn't abide the clutter you seem to be happy with. I want my Inbox to show me only new messages that need to be dealt with. Ditto for the Sent folder.
Thunderbird's Junk Controls don't ordinarily delete messages, just label them or move them to a nominated folder. I would hope your messages were not permanently deleted.
Modified by Zenos
Please amend the term "spam" to "junk" in all cases.
Yes the emails were completely deleted from the server and not simply moved to another box even though as you correctly state they *shouldn't* have been deleted.
Carbonite saved me as they did have a backup of my inbox. I can't put them back on the server though, so they are in their own local folder home now by necessity.
Any email below the top 20 is not seen in the main window pane and therefore never bothered me as clutter. On the contrary they would occasionally act as reminders of something I hadn't decided what to do with yet or someone I wanted to contact. Mail stacked on the counter on the other hand..that qualifies as clutter. Personal preference I guess.
I had already determined that in the future I would need to be making local folders if I keep using Thunderbird since we have a loss of trust right now. I just want Mozilla to know that it really did truly happen and I didn't do anything crazy to make it happen.