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Gmail horror story - any ideas?

mset

Senior member
I'm putting this in computer help. Hope it's okay. I'm going to tell the whole story even though it's kind of long.

2 days ago I tried to use Thunderbird to copy 8 years worth of gmail messages to another gmail account. In retrospect I should have just archived all the items in my existing account. I guess I wanted to have one account cleaned up.

Anyhow, I found an instructional for how to do this using T-Bird and 2 gmail accounts. The process did not go well and I decided to abandon the attempt. When I got back to gmail, it was acting really weird - every time I went to compose a brand-new message, it said 'You are trying to send a message from a Trashed conversation...'. In addition, I could not send myself an email from a hotmail account to my Gmail account (which is my main account). The gmail account had stopped accepting emails!

Miraculously, that problem cleared itself up in about an hour. No idea why. However, I then realized that I was now missing about 4,000 emails from my inbox (about 1500 remained). I looked in the Trash but the Trash was empty! So was my Sent items, for some reason.

I have redundant backups of all my most important emails so I wasn't freaking out but as the day went on I realized that there might be some lost stuff which I would like to have. So I started looking for items by using the search bar. Then I realized that at the bottom of the search results window, I was seeing the familiar (to Gmail users) message 'Deleted items match your search... click here to view'. I thought that was weird since the trash was empty - there were no deleted items . So I did a search for 'is:trash'... and lo and behold, my 4,000 emails are there! Great, so I go to Settings-->Filters and try to create a filter to grab all those emails. I enter "is:trash" in the 'Has The Words' field.. and it returns not 4,000, but 97 items.

I have used this method to select multiple thousands of messages before so I am not sure why it's not working now

So that's it. These items are in the Trash somewhere. They're going to be gone in 30 days. But I can't find them. Clicking on Trash in the left hand coumn shows nothing. I can probably move them around manually but there has to be a better way.

Can anyone help me find these emails and help me migrate them either into archive or even back into the inbox?

Long winded, I know. I hope there's a Gmail specialist who can help.

Nick
 
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nota gmail expert, read entire post an have no clue what your doing sorry..

but just fyi, on XP anyway, i just go to...
/Documents&settings/<name>/ApplicationData/Thunderbird/Profiles/<name>/Mail/<name>/

and you can manually copy any Account folder

As part of my backup process personally i just backup my entire <Name>/ApplicatinoData folder which consiquently contains all emails
 
Is there more than one trash folder? One for each connection and one for the application in general?
 
i just go to...
/Documents&settings/<name>/ApplicationData/Thunderbird/Profiles/<name>/Mail/<name>/

and you can manually copy any Account folder
Thanks for the responses guys. Yes, I figured this out after thinking about it for a while, but unfortunately, when the T-Bird process wasn't going too well, I uninstalled it. Later I realized the emails should be on my drive after I downloaded them all, but the folder you mentioned seemed to be gone after I uninstalled. Any other s/w maker would probably leave all that on the rig but Mozilla takes it off, I guess.

Is there more than one trash folder? One for each connection and one for the application in general?
I assume you mean for T-Bird? Actually my gmail account mapped over to T-Bird very nicely with all my labels intact. I don't know if there's a general trash folder for T-Bird.

In the end, I found a way to get my messages back. They would not import into my Inbox but when I created a new label in Gmail and asked for them to be added to that label, it happened in a matter of seconds. Now when I search for [ is:trash ], I don't get any results, and I am hoping that this means the messages are no longer considered trash.
 
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