Mozilla Thunderbird and AVG Experts, I Need Your Help

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

For any of you who are experts in both Thunderbird and AVG, I could really use your assistance.

I ran an AVG scan the other day, and it identified a trojan virus in an email. It put the thing into the virus vault. What I didn’t know at the time, though, was that it put almost my ENTIRE inbox into the AVG virus vault. Almost all my emails for about the last nine months simply disappeared.

I didn’t panic. (OK, I panicked a lot.) But I googled and tried to find out what had happened and what I could do about it. I use Thunderbird for business email. I am the owner of my business. I NEED those missing emails!

So I followed the Thunderbird instructions here for recovering a quarantined inbox and, following AVG’s instructions, I “restored” my inbox file from the virus vault. The inbox file no longer displays as being in the virus vault. (Meaning it is gone from the virus vault.)

Problem: The inbox isn’t restored in Thunderbird as I expected it to be. All those emails from the last 9 months are not there. Or at least I’m not seeing them.

Now I don’t know what to do. I have not yet closed either AVG or Thunderbird. I’m afraid if I close either one I’ll end up permanently deleting things. I feel like I’ve missed a step somehow, though I followed the instructions exactly. I have Thunderbird set to display all. There’s nothing in the trash folder. There’s nothing in the archives folder. Where’s my “restored” inbox? By the way, there are three profiles on Thunderbird for three business email addresses I use. Only the first (main) one was affected. The other two seem to be fine.

Am I screwed? Please tell me that I’m not. I NEED those emails! (Yeah, I know I should have backed them up. I didn’t, though, so chastising me about it isn’t going to help at this point, OK?) By the way, I discovered that AVG was set to automatically “heal” viruses. I have now got that box unchecked and it will remain unchecked.

Please no snark about how Thunderbird or AVG sucks. It’s what I’m using. I may change in the future, but it’s my setup for now. I need helpful posts, please.

Anyone who can help me will get some home baked cookies. Or at least my very sincere thanks. Whichever you prefer. And mods, if I’ve posted this in the wrong forum, please accept my apologies and move it wherever you’d like. Thanks. And/or cookies.

2

If you don’t get adequate answers here try more specialized forums such as:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=39

3

Check if you email files are somewhere misplaced on your hard-drive where Thunderbird can’t find them. Thunderbird stores emails in the mbox (.mbox) format. If you use windows use the “search programs and files” function to search for “*.mbox” without the quotation marks and see if it finds anything.

Ok, so apparently if Thunderbird doesn’t, for some reason, find it’s old inbox folder it creates a new folder and carries on. If that happened your files might still be there. Check “C:\Users*YOUR USERNAME*\AppData\Roaming” and see what you find there. You profile should either be in the “Mozilla” folder or “Thunderbird” folder. You need to have “view hidden files” enabled in Windows explorer:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hidden-files#show-hidden-files=windows-7

If you find them, great, do a backup (copy/paste the folder somewhere) and try to import the old folder into the new in Thunderbird.

What email provider are you using? There’s a chance you emails are still stored server side. If you’re using a service like Gmail or Outlook you could to try to connect to your account from your browser. If there’s nothing there you could try and contact your service provider’s support and see if they can restore them for you.

4

Thanks so much to both of you! At this point it seems like my computer is just, I dunno, HAUNTED or something. Last night the whole thing became completely unresponsive and I had to shut off power and turn it on again.

When Thunderbird came up, most of the emails from yesterday were gone, too.

I had created an “OldInbox” folder in my profile yesterday, though, so those are there instead of in the regular inbox where they should be.

I had windows search “everything” and there is no .mbox file anywhere that windows can find, but there is a pcv file that is 196 MB.

This pcv file, I believe, is the old profile that I used mozbackup (I think it’s called) to create. Would my emails be there in that old profile? 196 MB seems kinda big. It’s so odd, though, because I backed up that profile AFTER the emails went missing.

Neither the Thunderbird or Mozilla folders have anything recent. The scan happened on 4/25. Everything in both folders is before that date.

I still can’t find where AVG “restored” the inbox to and can’t seem to find anything online about where I should be looking for it. The filename of the file in the virus vault on AVG that I told it to restore definitely ended with the word “inbox.” I can’t find that file and don’t know where to look. Any ideas?

Thanking you both (and anyone else) in advance for more info/ideas. I really appreciate it!

5

The .pcv file is a backup of your Thunderbird profile. A backup should contain emails. Make a backup of the backup before you start messing with it.

It’s also a renamed zip folder and you can extract the information manually. Make a backup copy of the file somewhere. Rename the file extension from .pcv to .zip. Open with any file archiver and extract the contents to your profile.

To edit file extensions you need to enable that in Windows:

http://www.mediacollege.com/microsoft/windows/extension-change.html

If you don’t have a file archiver installed, though I think Windows 7 has one built in, 7-zip is pretty good:

http://www.7-zip.org/

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This computer has windows 8. Should it have a built-in file archiver?

Would it make any difference that I created the backup profile AFTER the emails disappeared? Thanks!

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I made a copy of the pcv file and saved it to the desktop. (I also made another copy and saved it to a thumb drive just in case…) Using your instructions I was able to change the file extension to .zip. (Thank you! I changed the extension on the desktop copy, if that makes any difference.)

But now I need more help. What do you mean to extract it to my profile? I don’t know how to do that. This is where I should admit that I really don’t know what I’m doing computer-wise. I’m actually quite intimidated by this process and, in fact, by anything “computer” that is more difficult than posting on a message board. I suppose the truth is out now! :dubious:

8

Logic dictates that there shouldn’t be emails in that backup file but I’d check it anyway. Windows 8 has a built-in archiver and .zip files should open like any folder.

Did you try opening the email account from your Browser? What service are you using? If it’s a business email account you’re paying money for it then there has to be a customer support service you can inquire if they can restore the emails server side.

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I can get to the emails through the server, but it will be a huge, huge PITA. My hosting provider keeps emails in packets that I have to go back in and make active, forward the old emails I want, make inactive, go the prior packet, forward the emails I want, make inactive, etc. I’m not sure “packet” is the correct word for this, but they’re in separate bundles, not just all easily available to redownload in one go. That’s why I was trying to do it this way.

Now there is an interesting development. I went back into AVG because I’m just stumped where AVG “restored” my inbox to yesterday, and there is another file there in the virus vault, with a different name of some letters & numbers and .default, with “inbox” at the end.

When I backed up the profile yesterday, I used the distinct email address that mozbackup suggested I use.

OK, this may not be making sense. When I first set up Thunderbird, I only received email for one email address. (That’s the one that went missing the other day.) I have since added on 2 additional email addresses to receive email on this computer for. So in other words, I added two additional email accounts (profiles.) Those 2 additional email accounts have not had the problem. It has all happened in the original email address.

So now there is a file in the virus vault from a scan from 1:30 this morning that has the file name c:\ALLTHESTUFFYOUPOSTEDYESTERDAY hunderbird\profiles\BUNCHASTUFF.default\mail\NAMEOFHOSTING COMPANY .com\inbox (The caps are, of course, what I’ve substituted here.)

From what I saw yesterday, the “default” stuff is new in this file. I guess it’s called “default” since I was only getting email for one account when I first started using Thunderbird. And there’s also the possibility that I’m just imagining this “difference” and really, truly, do not know what the heck I’m doing!

I’d like to try to manually restore the emails from this file. AVG gives me the option of “restore,” which I used yesterday which didn’t work since I could never find where it actually restored the file to, and try to “restore as” this time to hopefully have more control over the process. Then go in and manually delete the email containing the virus.

Do you think this would work? And if so, can you help me with some step-by-step instructions?

And, if you’re in the US, what’s your favorite kind of cookie? :smiley:

10

Try the restore as option and restore to a folder of your choosing and see what it contains. The emails, if there, should be in .mbox format.

Check what kind of email server type you are using. There are two kinds in popular usage: IMAP and POP3. In the Thunderbird main window right click on the account in question and select “Settings”. From the window select server settings and first line should read “Server type” which is IMAP or POP3. With POP3 emails are downloaded and stored locally. With IMAP the mail is not permanently stored so the quarantined file might just contain some of messages you recently worked with. I found a guide to re-download old messages from the IMAP server that might work:
http://superuser.com/questions/354280/how-can-i-force-thunderbird-to-download-all-emails-by-imap
If it’s POP3 server then restoring emails should be as easy as copying them into your profile. I’m not entirely sure how the Thunderbird profile local folder tree looks like. Here’s a link but it’s not accessible right now:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Local_Folders

Mozilla FAQ about profiles:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-tb

The emails are probably stored in logically named folders: inbox ,outbox etc.

You might want to try and just create a new account/profile (without deleting the old one) in Thunderbird and see if it downloads the old emails.