LOL Thunderbird 3 deleted my entire email history

[Stark]

Now of course I have a backup so it's more outrageous than damaging, but still. TB silently deleted 100% of my email without backup; I had the folder open and saw my file change from ~100Mb to 4kb. In what scenario would this ever be a useful feature? TB even briefly showed my real inbox before it deleted everything. PS TB has a 'never delete anything' option and won't let you delete spam without a prompt. Ooops.

[Oskuro]

Tsk, silly Stark, who are you to question their space-saving methods? Have megabytes been freed? Yes? There you go, it works!

[Dominus Atheos]

As it turns out, email clients suck and you should join the rest of us in the 21st century and use webmail? Lol, who knew amirìte.

[Stark]

The reason I'm not concerned is I didn't lose anything. It's just hilarious that a mail client can silently rewrite the db to'empty without asking. That the quality you only get from free software.

[white_rabbit]

Did that to me as well last week, fucking thing.

However, in my case it hadn't so much deleted it, as it had renamed the Local folder to Local Folder (1) and given me a brand new empty local folder.

Fuck knows why, but apparently this just "happens" occasionally.

[Stark]

Oh don't worry, I've got Local Folder (1) too. Quality.

[Oskuro]

Maybe it's a way to archive old emails or somesuch?

In any case, my main gripe with email, both client-based or web-based is how troublesome it tends to be to migrate your inbox or simply store it to disk. Seeing how most mails are text, or html, couldn't there be a function to dump all of them into a folder in said formats? Then you can zip them and store them, and read the ones you wanna keep around without the mail client.

If such functionality exists, please, someone enlighten me.

[Teleros]

I've used Outlook to save emails in bulk to .txt format in the past, but mostly I just back it all up periodically as a .PST file on an external HDD. If anything goes missing then I can just restore my emails from there.

[Edi]

Did that happen as part of an update? I've never had anything like that happen, but I've turned off nearly all automated settings in TB.

[Bounty]

Might be Thunderbird picking up the slack from you not compacting your folders once in a while. If you don't compact TB starts going wonky and this may be a safeguard.

[Edi]

Might be Thunderbird picking up the slack from you not compacting your folders once in a while. If you don't compact TB starts going wonky and this may be a safeguard.

I have never compacted my mail folders and I've never experienced this. Mind you, I've got mails from 2001 onwards in my TB profile and belong to a couple of mailing lists too, and never anything.

The one thing I do take care of every once in a while is defrag the TB mail folders, because they get fragmented to hell really fast.

[Dominus Atheos]

As it turns out, email clients suck and you should join the rest of us in the 21st century and use webmail?

Webmail sucks even worse!

What's you're problem with webmail?

[Uraniun235]

It's not like the cloud ever loses your data, right?

[Marcus Aurelius]

What's you're problem with webmail?

Oh god, where do I start?

1) It is really slow. Instead of popping up my client (which happens instantly btw), I have to wait on a slow ass site to come up. Wastes a lot of time. Then, even after the site comes up, you have to wait all bloody day for each individual message to come up. Ugh.

2) It is unreliable. Sites go down, and now you can't get at your stuff.

I totally agree with you. When gmail became available through IMAP, I immediately dumped the stupid webmail interface and switched to a real email client. It is so much better in every way I can't describe it, and since it's IMAP (POP3 of course sucks, it's basically a holdover from the dialup era), you still don't have to store any messages locally if you don't want to.

I don't agree with you on Mozilla being incompetent, or at least not any more incompetent than anybody else in the browser business. They all suck in some ways and IE sucks the most. I don't know how they manage it, but certainly it is a good proof that paying the coders money does not guarantee anything.