meridian_rose

On Sunday night I was trying to fix the problems with my intermittent and slow internet connection. By the time I'd finished I'd rebooted half a dozen times, installed lots of updates, and had to run a chkdsk command. So far, so good.

Monday morning however and I opened my email client, Thunderbird, only to find my inbox was empty. My other folders were all intact and new email was downloadable, but all the emails stored in my top level inbox were missing.

I spent all day trying every trick on the web to get them back. This disappearing inbox thing is a rather common problem it seems. However even after uninstalling Thunderbird twice [first time didn't take, the application claimed it was in use and locked...had to manually delete the folders as well before I could reinstall a clean copy] and having no email at all, then finally getting my backed up profile to reinstall, I had all my emails back...except for the inbox.

On the plus side, I only lost the inbox. And in December I decided to clean out the inbox and made a new folder for some of the mails. So I only had fifteen or twenty emails in the inbox rather than the fifty I would have lost if this had happened in early December. But I keep emails in there, tagged by colour, as reminders of things I'm to do. Icon contests I've signed up for, locatetv emails where I've to put a particular episode or movie in my Sky planner, reviews and comments I'm going to reply to but haven't done so yet.

So now I've made a new folder to put emails in when I need to do something further to them/they're reminders of things I'm to do. No emails will be left in the inbox when I'm going to be rebooting the pc. In fact I'm trying to deal with emails immediately, filing anything that needs further attention straight away.

As I said, it could have been worse. It's been a reminder to back up more often, and changed how I manage my inbox. So if you use Mozilla Thunderbird, consider this a cautionary tale ;D