Messages disappeared from Thunderbird

[Konstantin Svist]

On 12/18/2010 11:16 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On 12/17/2010 02:40 PM, Konstantin Svist wrote:
>> ..right in front of my eyes, as my fingers were resting on the keyboard!
>>
>> I selected several messages in my Inbox, planning to move them to
>> another folder... my fingers were resting on ctrl/alt/shift area (left)
>> and arrow keys (right). Suddenly the selected messages disappeared as if
>> I pressed Shift+Delete
>>
>> I've already checked Archives and searched entire Local Folders -- those
>> messages are gone
>>
>>
>> What the hell could've happened?
>>
> A couple of things. First, is your inbox IMAP or POP3, or do you have a
> SPAM filter set, or other automatic filters, or possibly your index is
> corrupt. Your inbox is composed of two file, Inbox and Inbox.msf. The
> Inbox is the place where the email is stored. When you receive an email,
> that email is added to the end of Inbox. When you delete an email, the
> email is just marked as delete, it is not physically removed until you
> compact the file. The Inbox.msf is an index, and this is where you see
> the files in Thunderbird. You can physically delete the msf file, but I
> would do this when thunderbird is not running. The restart Thunderbird.
> If you have not compacted in a while it might be useful to do this. WRT:
> IMAP/POP3. With POP3, when you retrieve your email from the server it is
> physically downloaded to your system and deleted from the server, but
> with IMAP, your email will remain on the server until you either delete
> it or move it to another folder.
>

Thanks Jerry
I've already recovered the mails using Thunderbird-Reset-Status [1] and 
installed ConfirmBeforeDelete addon [2] to lessen the chances of it 
happening again.. although I still have a suspicion that it might, since 
I know I didn't press Shift+Del


[1] http://nic-nac-project.de/~kaosmos/misc/index.html
[2] https://nic-nac-project.org/~kaosmos/index-en.html