AVast deleted my thunderbird inbox. Anyway to get it back with the messages?
avast could not do it automatically unless you asked so… in Heuristic module settings.
avast could not delete clean messages. I bet on your spam killer. Why do you think this is avast related?
I don’t see how that’s posible, yes it can delete infected emails (that you instruct it to delete), but it does this before the email reaches the email inbox and not within the inbox its self.
Have you checked where thunderbird stores email data and is there an inbox database there, is there more than one. Thunderbird may create a missing or corrupt inbox like OE does.
I would suggest that you check out the Thunderbird forums and see if there is some way of recovering a corrupted or deleted email database.
It is quite possible that your inbox became corrupted in some way, which happens at time with Outlook Express. My solutoin the the possible inbox corruption problem is not to store email for long periods in the inbox, having read them they are moved to a specific mailbox for that type of email, personal, newsletters, etc.
It happened when avast was doing a system scan and the email client was open. It said it found a virus and I clicked on the delete button. I thought it was going to delete the message, didn’t realize it was going to delete the whole inbox. Closed Thuderbird and then opened Thunderbird and all new 19 messages were gone, plus any old messages.
Tried to use recovery tools but nothing was found.
This happened to me too last night. I have never had any problems with Thunderbird whatsoever and as soon as I installed Avast and did a scan, it happened exactly as tdrumbower said. This has to be Avast related in my opinion. I really hope someone has a solution to this out there. I tried with several recovery tools too, tdrumbower, with no good results… Thanks!!
Not knowing what way thunderbird stores emails, I can’t really offer any further information.
I do know that if avast picked up potential virus in an OE .dbx file (lets say inbox.dbx), it won’t allow you the option to delete or repair as it can’t/doesn’t know how to extract individual emails from within the .dbx file. You have to effectively find the offending email within your email program and delete it manually.
So I can only assume that this wolud be the same if TB used a similar method of storage (multiple emails compressed in one database file).
In theory avast should have picked up this email virus before it got into your inbox (if it was able to pick it up in a regular scan), or it may have been there before you installed avast or it was a new virus, recently added to the iAVS.
I appreciate that this doesn’t resolve your problem of getting back you old inbox, that information would best be sought at the TB forum.
David,
I would say that it is a similar way of storage.
I just feel very hesitant to use Avast again if this is what will happen when I scan my PC again and it finds a virus in my inbox. Any ideas of how I should handle it in the future? Just ignore the warning and try to find the infected email and delete it? If I didn’t know better I would say that it is a bug in the program that allows this to happen. Don’t you think?
Thanks for the responses!
dtrumbower,
I found this on the Thunderbird forum… http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.phtml?title=Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_Anti-virus_Software
I hope it can help you out.
Of course, if you use Internet Mail provider and/or Outlook plugin you should be protected without need to run an on-demand scanning. Avast did that because it was the only thing you can do in an infected stored message. Avast should protect your computer and you had a virus. It warned you and you should send the file to Chest or moved it to another folder. You deleted it
It should not happen when you scan the emails while you’re downloading them. The provider will manage (delete, send to Chest, etc.) just the email you’re receiving right now and not the entire Inbox.
It’s not a bug. It’s the normal protection of an antivirus. Sorry, you should not delete the file. I understand but, sometimes, we need to know exactly what we are doing in front of this evil display :-\
About the link you posted, I quoted some information:
Thunderbird : FAQs : Anti-virus Software
Email messages that you download using Thunderbird are not stored as individual messages on your computer but are instead appended to your Inbox, a single mail file found in your profile folder. (Messages can also be filtered to other folders or sent automatically to the Junk folder.) This means that when your anti-virus software detects an infected message during download, the actions taken by your anti-virus software will likely affect your entire Inbox. For instance, if your anti-virus software is set to automatically delete infected messages or files, this may result in your entire Inbox being deleted.
This is why I can’t say it’s an avast problem but Thunderbird one…
With this in mind, below are some tips for using Thunderbird with anti-virus software:
Make sure that your anti-virus software is set to quarantine infected files rather than to automatically delete them.
You can set the providers on Advanced tab to ‘Silent Mode’ and answer ‘No’. This will send the file to Chest, automatically
Keep your Inbox relatively empty, or at least don’t store the bulk of your email in the Inbox. Instead, store most of your old messages in other folders. That way, if your anti-virus software ever happens to delete or damage your Inbox, few of your stored messages will be affected.
Set your POP3 mail account to leave messages on the server for a certain period of time (such as 3 days) rather than deleting them immediately when downloaded. That way, if your anti-virus software ever happens to delete your Inbox, you will then be able to download those messages that are still on the server. To do this, go to Tools → Account Settings → Server Settings, check the box for “Leave messages on server” and set the number of days. (Note: in some cases, setting Thunderbird to leave messages on the server may cause the same messages to be downloaded again and again. You will need to test your mail server to see how it responds.)
Good ideas or not, depend on your way of work, what is your technical level, etc.
Consider using third-party software such as Mailwasher so that before you download your mail into Thunderbird, you can scan the headers and delete suspicious messages from the server.
You can’t undelete these messages too…
Recovering a quarantined Inbox
- Switch off the “auto-protect” feature on your anti-virus software, or otherwise deactivate your anti-virus software; take the Inbox (or other affected mail file) out of quarantine.
- In Thunderbird, delete the infected message.
- Empty the Trash for the affected account.
- Compact folders for the affected account.
- Reactivate your anti-virus software.
Before going through the above steps, you might first want to make a temporary backup copy of the infected mail file or your entire profile. After you’ve successfully restored the Inbox, delete the backup from your computer.
Another suggestions and the way of Thunderbird works…
I don’t think that you should ever delete something until you identify exactly what it is and where it is. The safest course of action is repair (and this instance since the infection is within a file within a database, it can’t be repaired by avast or other AVs), then the move to chest option. This at least gives the fall back of moving it back to where it came or recovering data/emails (but you don’t know which is the infected email).
I think that you were unlucky in having a virus already in your system/emails when you installed avast (your previous AV let you down here).
The inbox is the most vulnerable to infection/corruption/deletion as its the mailbox that is open most of the time and if you experience a crash, it is likely to be corrupted.
That is why my inbox is not a storage location, just a tempory location until I have read and actioned the email, then it goes into a more appropriate, personal, newsletters, receipts, etc. There are just 4 emails in my inbox at this time so if I lost that no problems.
I also regularly backup (daily) my email folders, find where they are stored and copy them to a backup folder, if you lose something you have only lost one days worth of emails.
Back it up or lose it.
David,
I actually do what you do as well when it comes to moving the emails but I just hadn’t gotten around to it this time. I should have checked out how it would work before I did anything.
When I tried to delete the email it said that it couldn’t so I decided to move it to the chest and that seemed to be the only choice to make the program continue its scanning. I will have to check that out when I get home. Could I be that lucky? Although, I couldn’t see anything in the chest so I guess it is gone. Ah well, the world is not going to end because of some emails.
Well, words of wisdon 8)
Now you have avast, be sure to configure it and Thunderbird to work togheter