Thunderbird Mail Cataclysm

[Zeek]

This past weekend, right after spending HOURS sorting and archiving the one master copy of the last 6 mos worth of my email I have (had), it went completely south on me. The archived folder and all sub-folders disappeared as the program was running and I was working with them. Just like that. Here's what happened and what I've done since, to the best of my memory:

1. Sorted many emails
2. Renamed/added a few folders
3. Compacted emails a couple of times (without issue)

Maybe 15 minutes later, I was looking over things and getting ready to move them to a 2nd backup drive. Last thing I remember is clicking on something (probably a sub-folder) and seeing the entire thing...folder, sub-folders and all, just disappear. This isn't a case of some missing mails where one could go in and reflag to "un-delete" them. The folders are/were NOT in the trash, are not visible via explorer or through a cmd prompt, and I see no trace of them anywhere. Everythign else is intact, T-Bird still works, and Windows is fine. But, as for the folders - there is simply nothing there...not a trace.

Also, I don't think it's pertinent to this situation, but this *did* occur on a machine running a RAID0 config (I know, I know...). Again, though, everything else - OS and all - is running smoothly.

File recovery utilities (Stellar Phoenix, GetDataBack, & Paragon) find nothing. And, although I've had some very limited success with the trial version of Mail Recovery by Disk Internals, it's found only maybe 5% of the newly missing mails and a whole bunch of other, older stuff I don't really care about.

I've recoverd a lot of stuff before and have never, ever seen anything like this. What's worse, this mail is very valuable to me and it took a hit at exactly the one brief moment when it was the only copy around. If ANYONE has ANY bright ideas or a clue of what I should be doing or where to go from here, *please* post away.

Thanks for reading my post...

[GDH]

Hi,

The first thing to check is if you can find your ThunderBird mail files and see how big they are. This will tell you if you need to try and repair your existing files, or whether you need to search your drive for deleted data (If the mail files are still a reasonable size, then they most likely still contain the data. If they are only small, then you need to search the entire hard disk for deleted email).

Thunderbird's mail files are in the standard plain text "mbox" format.

Your mail files are inside your profile. Each mail folder (Inbox, Sent, etc.) is stored as two files — one with no extension (e.g. INBOX), which is the mail file itself (in "mbox" format), and one with an .msf extension (e.g. INBOX.msf), which is the index (Mail Summary File) to the mail file.

To Locate your profile folder

• On Windows Vista/XP/2000, the path is usually %AppData%\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\, where xxxxxxxx is a random string of 8 characters. Just browse to C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\ on Windows XP/2000 or C:\users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\ on Windows Vista, and the rest should be obvious.
  
• On Windows 95/98/Me, the path is usually C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default \

[Zeek]

Thanks for your quick reply, but I am unfortunately way ahead of all that. I probably wasn't clear in my earlier post so, to clarify:

- WRT to the folders in question, there are no files for them to check. They simply don't exist anymore, and I didn't delete them. Again, I watched them vanish right before my eyes with one click.

- Other folders (inbox, sent mail, etc.) are all still there and sizes are as expected.

Sadly, I'm all too familiar with where those files are supposed to reside. As I say, they're gone and not visible when using Explorer, a cmd prompt, or Thunderbird itself.

Any other ideas? I'm fresh out and frustrated.