[Soundy]

Trying to get a friend fixed up here... she had her email account (inboxes and all) disappear from her Thunderbird 2.x. Local Folders are still there and she is receiving mail somehow, all her Inbox subfolders are still there and populated, but the mail account has disappeared from the tree and all her old Inbox contents are missing.

Now here's the thing: the entire original Inbox and the rest of the account are still there in the profile folder on the disk, but the folder tree in Tbird doesn't show them.

And now the really odd part: I created a new test account with fake settings... and it doesn't appear in Tbird's folder tree either.

Any thoughts on this?

[bozz]

Go into the Thunderbird Profile folder and with Thunderbird closed, delete all .msf files. They will be re-created on Thunderbird start-up. Then compact all folders.

[Soundy]

Thanks, I'll give that a go!

[hewee]

Also maybe your not showing all the folders.
See image and you got the < arrows > to the right that you can click on.
When you have all the folders show up it will say "All Folders"

[Soundy]

Well, it looks like the Inbox folder is corrupted somehow. I suspect before I got there, my friend created a new account with the "Copy new messages to Local Folders" option, or something, which is why she no longer had a separate account folder showing.

In any case, I tried importing the old Inbox with all her missing mail, into her current account, but it kept killing her ancient, underpowered machine... so I downloaded the whole 280+MB "Inbox" file to my Athlon 64 with 3GB RAM and tried adding it to my own Tbird Local Folders... well, it took all night, with memory usage running over 500MB, at times spiking over 700MB (no wonder it was killing her PII with 256MB RAM!), but it finally finished... and the folder appears empty. Tried Compacting it... no change. File size is still on the order of 280MB...

I've tried the MozBackup trick mentioned on the Tbird forums, to no avail...

Any other ideas?

[throoper]

Check HERE.
I've never tried a text editor with one that big, but the article says you can, so it might be worth trying.
T.