Deletion of New Account in Tbird Results in Loss of Mail in Primary Account

I had something quite interesting happen today, and I think it bears mentioning.

Normally, I use a single account named JSS in Tbird 1.5, and have my POP3 (inbound) mail handled by the mail server at my website's host. This morning I created a new Tbird account for the POP3 server at my ISP (Optimum Online), and named it OOL. The newly created folders appeared in Tbird's left (Folders) pane but, for some reason, the name of the account did not. Because there were no messages on the Optonline server at the time, all folders in the new account were empty.

Because I suspected that something wasn't right, I deleted the new account but, surprisingly, the JSS account disappeared as well, leaving only the useless (to me) Local account. After a moment of panic, I checked the mail folders in my Tbird profile ... everything looked OK, with the exception of the Inbox file in the Mail folder, which was much smaller than it had been previously.

Fortunately, I maintain a duplicate Tbird installation on my laptop computer, and it was a simple matter to copy the prefs.js file and the three Inbox files in the Mail folder to my desktop profile. I lost a couple of days worth of inbound mail, because my laptop wasn't quite up to date, but nothing important.

Only the messages in my Inbox were deleted; messages in the Inbox's subfolders and in the Sent folder and its subfolders were not affected.

I can't explain why it happened but the lesson, of course, is always back up your data before making configuration changes.

Has anyone else had a similar experience?

 

Jim,

Although the daily Aviary you use is, for the most part, stable, I would think that this type of problem wouldn't be unexpected, as the aviaries aren't official releases.

Did you by chance check the Local Folders folder for messages? My first thought was that when you created the new OOL Mail Acct., that perhaps you didn't disable the "Global" mail setting, therefore your messages were received in the Local Folders which is used for that purpose.

As you said, a good reason to make a backup each day, and certainly when you edit your Profile in any way.

 

Hi Ramona,

I haven't used the daily aviaries since the 1.5 release candidates became available, meaning that I've been using the installed versions of both FF and TB for some time. My FF build is dated 11-11-05, and the TB build 12-01-05.

The first place I looked was in the Local folders but, as expected, they were completely empty.

I don't normally edit anything in my profile, and the creation of a new account seemed pretty straightforward, as did its deletion. Don't know what went wrong, but I sent a message to all my correspondents asking that they re-send any messages they might have sent since 2 January, and they're rolling in.

 

Jim,
you scared the heck out of me, although I did not have to create a new account. But, I had installed TB1.5, which was not necessary, since it seems to be identical to the RC2. But, as it is usually the case, when the profile is left alone, everything was in place.
Anyway, as you would suspect I have multi-accounts with go with my multi-programs. and, I have them in different order in TB1.0.7 and 1.5.
But, whatever you describe is quite interesting, though not likely to happen to everyone. I don't know why, but there may have been a problem with the website's host server vs. the POP3 ISP server. What format is the website's host server? Just a thought.

 

Jim,

Wow, that is very unusual then, to lose Mail when having done no more than create a new Mail Account. If you are running RC2, then I will try creating some new Mail Accounts and see what happens, as I just installed TB 1.5.

 

Westside / Ramona ...

As you will note from my original post, I scared the heck out of myself, too! I had RC1 installed but, as it had updated itself a couple of times, it may well have been RC2 that was running when the new account debacle happened yesterday. Just prior to writing this, however, I uninstalled Tbird, cleaned the registry, and installed 1.5.

To explain a bit further about what I was attempting to do, I don't use my Optonline email address, but I do get a lot of spam in my account there (POP3, Westside ... I've never used IMAP). I've used a separate Tbird profile (OOL) for that account, and check it when I think of it, just to delete the spam so it won't accumulate on the server. But, to switch from one profile to the other, it's necessary to close Tbird and re-open it.

My thought was that, if I established the Optonline email address as an additional Tbird account, I wouldn't have to keep switching from one profile to the other and, in fact, could do away with the OOL profile entirely. The Junk Mail controls would continue to send the spam directly to the Trash folder, which I empty several times a day, anyway.

Now, with a current backup, I'm going to try again. I'll report back with the results.

 

I'm going to give this up as a bad job. This time, when I created the new account, the name showed up, but no folders were visible (exactly the opposite of what happened yesterday), and the server settings in Account Settings wouldn't stick.

I deleted the new account with no problems, and re-created it as a local folder, but the settings still wouldn't stick, so I deleted it again. This time, however, everything disappeared from the left pane except the Local account, with all of its folders. Once again, I was unable to access my normal JSS account. I recovered the easy (but brute force) way by deleting the JSS profile and copying the one from my fresh backup.

 

Wow! Anyway, I had not suggested that you had an IMAP setting in one set up, and POP3 in the other. I was going by what you said:
Normally, I use a single account named JSS in Tbird 1.5, and have my POP3 (inbound) mail handled by the mail server at my website's host. This morning I created a new Tbird account for the POP3 server at my ISP (Optimum Online)
whatever that means.
Anyway, one never knows, as my reply to James illustrated..

 

Westside ...

I naturally assumed (incorrectly, it seems) that you were asking whether it's POP3 or IMAP. What did you mean?

 

Jim,

This is very weird indeed. I duplicated what you did, adding an account which I normally access online, simply because of the volume of spam. Online, I can forward the spam to the ISP en masse, which I can't do from Mail & Newsgroups.

Bottom line, I created the account, let it download Mail, closed TB, then reopened. I then checked my other Mail Accounts, and nothing had changed in Mail & Newsgroups. Then I deleted the account, closed/opened TB, and all was well???

What SMTP server did you use when you set up the new account? Is OOL your defaul SMTP server? Using more than one SMTP server can cause problems...

 

Ramona ...

"I duplicated what you did, adding an account which I normally access online, simply because of the volume of spam. "​

This is exactly what I currently do, although I don't send the spam back to my ISP. I was simply trying to avoid switching back and forth between profiles just to delete the spam from the Optimum Online (Optonline) server, which I don't use for inbound mail.

"Bottom line, I created the account, let it download Mail, closed TB, then reopened. I then checked my other Mail Accounts, and nothing had changed in Mail & Newsgroups. Then I deleted the account, closed/opened TB, and all was well??? "​

I guess what's sauce for the goose isn't necessarily sauce for the gander.

"What SMTP server did you use when you set up the new account? Is OOL your defaul SMTP server? "​

Yes, Optonline is my default SMTP server, and was set up in both accounts. The only servers that differed were the POP3 servers ... mail.jssxpress.com for the JSS account and mail.optonline.net for the OOL account.

 

Jim,

Try using only your mail.optonline.net SMTP server as the default. That is if you want to go thru the whole process again...

 

I thought that it could have been neither. But it does not matter.

 

Better read my last message again, Ramona ... "Optonline [mail.optonline.net] is my default SMTP server, and was set up in both accounts. "

 

Jim,

Guilty of reading too quickly, as this is what I saw:
The only servers that differed were the POP3 servers ... mail.jssxpress.com for the JSS account and mail.optonline.net for the OOL account.