Hello,

Maybe this help:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Disappearing_mail

Tried these and had no luck. Thank you.

Did you try repair the folder ?

Click with right button mouse on Inbox >> Properties >> Repair Folder</bloquote> I found other articles:

• http://www.omnitechsupport.com/Resources/EmailClients/mozilla/generic/four.html
• http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1230395
• http://discussions.virtualdr.com/showthread.php?246937-RESOLVED-All-Messages-Disappeared-Suddenly-Out-of-Inbox-in-Thunderbird

I hope one of them help

Yes, I tried "Repair" several times. It did nothing. Also tried all the other suggestions with no luck. Thank you.

What is the size of your Inbox file?
The mail file is a text file, so you can open it with an editor. Do you see any of the missing messages?
In case you haven't done this yet, make a copy of the Inbox file and use the copy for checking.

Do you let your anti-virus s/w scan your Thunderbird profile folder?

The file size is 25MB. I opened it with WordPerfect and cannot make sense of anything because they are all garbled numbers & codes. I do not know how to restore them back into Thunderbird as "readable". I tried pasting them into a new sub-folder in TB. The sub-folder was shown as containing file sizes, but when opened, it was empty. Is something corrupt?

Thank you.

You can try the following steps.

Close Thunderbird.
Make sure you do have a backup of the Inbox file in your profile.
Delete the Inbox file in your profile.
Start Thunderbird and install this add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/

Use the add-on to import the messages from the backed up Inbox file.

I am not real tech-savy, so please forgive me for asking this---do I delete the "Inbox.msf" or the Inbox that has no extension?

Thanks for all your help.

Delete both, Inbox, and Inbox.msf.

OK...First I tried importing the backup file as "eml" files & got error message saying "file seems not be an EML file or is corrupt". Then I tried importing it as "messages from all files" and it imported only one message (the backup file size is 14MB and there are about 30 emails in it). Then, after one message was imported, I got an error message saying "Mozilla TB not responding" which kept on for over 20 minutes. I finally closed the program down. Does anyone know how to convert the WordPerfect document (that has all the emails) from all gibberish to a readable text so I can at least have a hard copy of my lost messages? Thank you!

EML files would be individual messages. Your Inbox file is a mbox file, so you'll need to import that.

I don't understand how the size of the backed up Inbox file changed from 25 MB to 14 MB.

I'm not sure what you mean with gibberish. It could be a MIME encoded attachment, but you should see some normal text as well.

In any case, you cannot import WordPerfect documents.

I don't know why the size changed...maybe I deleted something??

I did try importing it and had nothing but problems (details on my previous reply).

I've spent 3 days on this now and I'm fed up. I guess I'll try using some email recovery program.

Thanks for the help.

All messages disappeared, but I can search for messages with age > 0, and see all the messages. I can save as a search folder, which provides me a clumsy work around, but that's not a solution. I hope this helps some of you. I hope someone posts a real fix for this annoyance.