Lost Emails

By Shamus Posted Friday Aug 22, 2008

Filed under: Notices 37 comments

Notice: If you emailed me today, please re-send.

Let me just say that while I love Firefox, its email counterpart, Thunderbird, is a constant irritant. I’d change email clients, but…

You see, I have every email sent to me since 1997. (Uh, except for today’s. And a few other one-day gaps from things like HD crashes, computer migrations, and whatnot.) My archives are now just over 6GB. Now, 99.999% of that is stuff I’ll never need, but once a year I have some reason to reach back into the archives that sort of justifies keeping them around. Moving to another email client at this point would be only slightly less difficult than (say) getting divorced and re-married. To a complete stranger.

Anyway, I know there were 5 unread, non-spam emails in there before the thing went kablooey. So if you sent me something today, please re-send. Sorry.

 


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37 thoughts on “Lost Emails

  1. Deoxy says:

    Aw, switching shouldn’t be THAT hard…

  2. Jeremiah says:

    I’d never used Thunderbird before about 5 months ago when I started my current job. I’ve never had any problems with it. ‘Course, I only use it for work, and even then it’s mostly for inter-office communication. Things might pick up once I’m in direct contact with clients.

    Anyhow, I’m rambling. Sucks that you’re having problems. No moderately low-hassle way to import all your e-mail archives into something else?

  3. Huckleberry says:

    I had a major problem with Tunderbird at my office a few weeks ago — which meant I lost all fivethousandthreehundredodd emails in my sent folder from the past 1 1/2 years, which I kept around for exactly the reasons Shamus mentioned. It was very annoying (<- what an understatement!)

    The worst thing was that the IT department did not have a backup. This was because I only found out that Thunderbird had lost the emails about 4 days after it had happend, and the most recent save of my profile — without the sent emails — had deleted any previous save; that taught me to trust them (and Thunderbird)… :(

    So: be careful with very large folders in Thunderbird.

  4. I used to use thunderbird, but Gmail is just so fantastically much easier that I don’t even bother with a desktop client anymore…

  5. Cavtroop says:

    I used to use Thunderbird. Its really a POS, truth be told. I have yet to find a desktop client (since the old Eudora, before they commercialized it) that I like.

    I changed my domain to use Google Apps. Highly recommended.

  6. Eltanin says:

    Poor as I am at it, I nevertheless am in charge of the IT for my small office (5.5 people). I immediately got everyone over to Firefox and Thunderbird and we’ve been reasonably content since then. Shamus I’d love to know what Thunderbird pitfalls you’ve discovered (or anyone else) so that I can either steer us clear of them or switch to some other e-mail client. What, exactly, makes people say that it is a “POS”? As I said, we’ve had to trouble, so I’m a bit surprised.

  7. bbot says:

    @Huckleberry

    Your IT dept didn’t do incremental backups? Lame.

  8. onosson says:

    I have to agree with Punning Pundit as far as gmail goes.

    I use Outlook (only for legacy reasons, really) but I have a gmail account which all my mail from different account forwards to. Outlook then downloads from all accounts and automatically files the emails away – thus I have multiple backups on my machine (although all in one .pst [stands for Piece of S**T] file) as well as on gmail.

    The last time my .pst got corrupted I simply created a new one and downloaded EVERYTHING from gmail; it took a while, but in the end all was recovered (at least I think so – if anything really ancient is missing, I’ll never need to know).

    Moral of the story: while I wouldn’t trust someone else’s servers to do the entire job, combining gmail with your own backup plan is fantastic. The way gmail automatically sends you copies of all the emails and replies that you create on their site in your browser and just the way that it in general syncs with Outlook (and, I’m assuming, other clients) is incredibly well thought out and implemented.

  9. Steve says:

    I know several people have recommended Gmail, but the thing is still in beta. I think I would wait for the 1.0 release before relying on it for serious use.

  10. Factoid says:

    I helped a client migrate from Thunderbird AND Eudora (some mail from two different ISPs in either one) into Outlook. It was actually completely painless. Almost every mail client I’ve ever used (including PINE on Unix) has an export feature that uses some sort of standard.

    6GB of mail would take a long time to export, but it’s a fairly automated process, and it preserves all the pertinent information (sender, recipients, timestamps, routing info).

    Now porting CALENDARS on the other hand…that’s a major pain.

  11. DJFM says:

    After several years and shuffling emails between many different email clients, I’ve now set up an IMAP server at home, so I can use any d*mn client I please (desktop if I’m at home, I’ve got squirrelmail if I’m elsewhere) and it’s pretty much okay. fetchmail sucks mail down from gmail and the others, and the whole lot ends up in one place. Which is of course backed up.

  12. Clint Olson says:

    For what it’s worth, I found an awesome program that will automatically upload all of your archived emails to a GMail account, keeping the date and sender and everything.

    http://marklyon.org/gmail/default.htm

    Also, Free Radical email resent. Hopefully it gets through this time…

    Clint

  13. Maddy says:

    I no longer use a desktop client either and do most of my email through web-only accounts. (I liked Eudora best for popmail, but I had too many problems with ISPs to rely on them for email accounts.)

    I’ve used Gmail for a couple of years and Yahoo even longer. If Microsoft buys out Yahoo I’ll just dump it and do everything in Gmail.

    It’s true that Gmail still says “beta,” but at this point that’s more of a running joke than a reliability warning.

  14. Brandon says:

    I hate to say it, but in this case your 6 GB of mail archives may be the problem. Every email program I know chokes on large mail folders/archives. Once your mailbox hits a certain size your change of data corruption/loss increases dramatically, simply due to the load of handling and parsing such a huge and monolithic mail file.

  15. Zerotime says:

    Why would moving to another client be a big deal? I mean, you’re using IMAP… right?

  16. Kizer says:

    Steve —

    Yeah, gmail’s still in beta. It’s been there for the past five years that I’ve been using it. In those five years, I have managed to fill up 3% of my available storage space, set up THREE different addresses to forward to my main account, and I have had no problems since I switched from ME to XP a few years ago. It seems that the Beta Gmail is more well-made and stable than most finished products on the market. I really don’t think you can go wrong with it. The only disadvantage to gmail is that it will occasionally change. For no good reason. And the changes might be confusing at first. But you know what they say: “Variety is the spice of life!”

  17. Illiterate says:

    But.. I hand typed a solution for PI.

    You mean that’s lost?

  18. David V.S. says:

    I used to use Thunderbird, but switched to gmail since I prefer its superior spam identification, interface, and ability to be accessed on any internet connection.

    I share Shamus’s need but it really is painless to make this switch. Users of gmail need should make occasional backups of their e-mail to a local hard drive anyway. I keep Thunderbird installed and now and then download my entire gmail account using it.

    This “gmail backup” is in a different folder than my archive of pre-gmail e-mails. So those times I need to search for an old e-mail I now do need to try to remember if it was pre- or post-gmail. But that is not a problem and if I am wrong I have only wasted a moment.

    I have not heard about the “upload your archive to gmail” application. That is tempting to use, but would then make my backups of gmail take a lot longer to do. Since I make backups more often than I search for an old email I’ll pass for now.

    What gmail really needs is a “clone my account” feature. Then if, Heaven forbid, someone did hack my gmail account and ruin it I could still have all my stuff ready and running. Since I use such a small percentage of my allotted gmail space, why not?

  19. xbolt says:

    I used to use Outlook, but then it inexplicably decided not to allow me to send any emails bigger than a few kilobytes. Needless to say, I was very annoyed.

    So I switched to Thunderbird, and am now much happier. It has (so far) only messed up on me once, but I was able to get all my emails back after that.

  20. Matt K says:

    I actually have been using Thunderbird to connect to my gmail account. I have yet to run into any problems but then again, I don’t get many emails. I prefer using a desktop based system since I can move messages easier. That said, I am curious about the problems with Thunderbird because I do use it for my primary email account.

  21. potemkin.hr says:

    Well, you can always backup the “C:\Documents and Settings\your_username\Application Data\Thunderbird” folder which contains all of your emails before reinstalling windows. After reinstalling windows and thunderbird you just copy the entire folder to its original location. This trick works with firefox also (it backups all of your settings, bookmarks and history)
    The firefox data folder is “C:\Documents and Settings\your_username\Application Data\Mozilla”
    NOTE: this is for windows users

  22. concerned says:

    I can’t believe how many of you want Google to read their email. Don’t you have any sense of privacy?

    That said, my mail storage is on IMAP folders that have backups. Thats as good as it goes in respect to more or less flawed IMAP specifications of clients. But then there’s webmail and you’re good to go.

  23. Hannes says:

    6GB? Try clicking on your folders and choose “compact”. Thunderbird normally does not really delete mails you delete, it just removes their entry in its index. So your 6GB might contain every single mail you got, even all the spam. Once you “compact”, deleted mails really get deleted.
    Stupid, isn’t it?

    http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_Tips_:_Compacting_Folders

  24. Mario says:

    I tried to use Thunderbird once — I loved Firefox so I figured that should be good too. Hated it. Be wary, though. When I tried to uninstall it, Firefox went with it. It was a few versions ago by now, but you should write down your list of Firefox add-ons just in case.

  25. Carra says:

    Been using thunderbird myself for a year or two. And been wondering why I’m using it, it’s a buggy product.

    With stepping over to Vista 64 bit, it used to crash after 30 seconds… Sure, it’s fixed in the newest release but it was a huge bug which lasted for weeks. And I have to run it as admin with Vista.

    And my hotmail account gives me “Unable to process directory” all the time. Waiting a few seconds helps but it’s not user friendly.

  26. onosson says:

    Just as an aside, for those others who do use Outlook, you might want to try Xobni as an add-on. It’s in beta, and may be still only available by invitation (I have some invites left if anyone’s interested), but it adds some really awesome functionality. It builds a network out of your emails and contacts, so that if you look up contact X and they have sent cc’s to Y and Z (and vice versa), then they all become part of the same network, with one-click accessibility from each other. There are some other interesting features, such as running tallies of total emails sent and received to/from each contact, including time of day graphs etc.

    Again, just send me an email if you want a free invite (limited quantities available!)

    sky “at” onosson “dot com”

  27. Joshua says:

    This may just be an isolated event, but what’s up with the category image?

    It has overlapping links and boxes and one of them says “Updates to” and another says “the website.” and a third one says “Notices.”

    Am I the only one seeing this?

  28. 6gb does seem a little excessive unless you have loads of huge attachments. I have 50568 emails and they only take up 600mb. I access those with Thunderbird via IMAP and haven’t had any problems so far.

    That said, it is very easy to move from Thunderbird to other programs because it saves folders in the standard mbox format which just about all tools can understand.

  29. Viktor says:

    Just FYI, the front page has “Updates on the Website” as the image for this post, and the lines are overlapping. Firefox 3, Windows XP, IIRC(school comp).

  30. Kotenku says:

    *rescinds*

  31. Deltaway says:

    Hey, Illiterate, so did I! But I think mine was slightly shorter:
    pi = (ln(-1))/i

  32. Nick says:

    I can't believe how many of you want Google to read their email. Don't you have any sense of privacy?

    I have to agree, Gmail users are OK with this? The price for your privacy is a few gigs of storage?

    So your 6GB might contain every single mail you got, even all the spam. Once you “compact”, deleted mails really get deleted. Stupid, isn't it?

    Every email app does this, it’s not stupid.

  33. InThane says:

    Here’s the thing – WHOEVER is your e-mail provider has the capacity to read your e-mail, either Google or your small dinky ISP. The only guarantee you have that they won’t is their word for it.

    You have two solutions:

    1. Use PGP to encrypt the hell out of everything. FireGPG is one such applet that works with GMail, although your e-mail itself is probably still exposed to GMail. If you use an external app, you can integrate a PGP plugin for that app, and that will keep you secure.
    2. Don’t use any e-mail service.

    Also, don’t forget about Carnivore – there was some noise that they took it down, but IIRC they took it down because they found a better solution, not because of privacy concerns. Face it, email is NOT a private communication channel.

  34. Phraktyl says:

    If you use IMAP, you should be able to pick up and switch without any problems at all—your emails should still be on the server.

    With that said, I have used several different email clients (including Thunderbird) and have gone back to mutt, using vi to write messages.

  35. Miral says:

    Ah, but storing all your email in GMail means that it’s all there all the time, and they could mine it whenever they wanted. Storing it on your local machine means that their only chance to mine it is as it passes through their server, which is a smaller window. Of course, being Google, they have infinite storage and could cache everything anyway, so it makes little difference :)

    (Similar arguments apply to other ISPs, although with less infinite storage and thus greater corresponding security.)

    I use Eudora, and I have a similar massive email archive. I’ve been toying with the idea of converting the whole lot to maildir format and putting it onto a local IMAP server box (to give a bit of extra redundancy, accessibility, and controllable spam-filtering), but I’ve never quite gotten around to it :)

  36. Zach says:

    Huh, I’ve been using Thunder Bird for 2 years and never had a problem with it, but then again I just use it to connect to a mail server I keep in my basement, so Thunderbird itself never really handles anything.

  37. ryanlb says:

    I also have been using Thunderbird for 2-3 years on 3+ different computers (home, work, laptop) to access the same IMAP account, with nary a problem.

    What problems are being referred to?

    Nary? Is that even a word?

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