I have a laptop and an iPhone. The mail app on the latter is set to my main email account. I have Thunderbird on my laptop, and I have both my main email account on there with some others.
Whenever I open my main email account on Thunderbird, and the inbox there updates, all the emails in my iPhone inbox vanish. They’re not deleted, so they’re not in my deleted email folder; they just go poof.
I don’t know what setting on either the iPhone, laptop, or the web interface of the email account needs to be toggled to prevent this. I’m also not sure how to web search for this. Does anyone know what to look for?
Who is your email provider, and what mail app are you using on the iPhone?
Without details, I’d blindly guess that maybe this is an IMAP or POP3 issue where Thunderbird is retrieving all of your email from the mailbox and marking them as such, making the email app on your phone think they’re gone.
How to change that behavior would depend on your specific provider. Is it an ISP provided email, or iCloud, or Gmail, or…? They’re all a bit different
Thunderbird is the guilty party here. It’s downloading the emails off the server and deleting them, obviously not is the modern fashion of ksing them to a ‘deleted’ folder but by wiping them from existence altogether. Been an age since I saw an email client default to that, but professor google says this is the change you need to make:
Access this by going to Account Settings > Server Settings and checking “Leave messages on server,” ensuring “Until I delete them” is selected.
Yeah, this is a useful setting, as, way back in the day, I used to check all my emails at work and at home, and I made sure that work emails remained on the work server, and personal emails on my home server, and I had to juggle the ‘leave mail on server’ settings to make it work the way I wanted.
If your Thunderbird is configured to access email via POP3, then deleting emails off the server is the only way it can work. The fix is to reconfigure Thunderbird to access your main email account via IMAP.
POP3 is a 25+ year old protocol nobody should still be using. But depending on how old your computer is, and how backwards the thinking was when you (or some tech) set it up, you may well have set up Thunderbird to use it.
I had a similar issue before I figured out the ‘leave mail on the server’ thing. If, when I left work for the day, I accidentally left my email client open, I’d miss about half of my emails. If my work computer happened to fetch them before my phone did, I wouldn’t see them until I got to work in the morning. Even more annoyingly, sometimes my phone would get them and beep to notify me, but by the time I looked, my work computer would have grabbed them.
Now I just leave them all on the server until I delete them. Then I have access to them via my work computer, my phone or the web client (gmail, in this case). I think, at the time, I thought it was more organized to pull them off the server and into my local client, but it just made things more difficult than necessary. Plus, I’d rather have all those emails (and tons of pdf attachments) taking up space on google’s servers instead of my local hard drive (as well as my local and cloud backups).
As has been stated, this is certainly a POP3 thing. POP3 removes emails from the server by default unless instructed otherwise.
If it were me, I would configure my account in Thunderbird to have it access the email server via IMAP. That would ensure that the emails remain on the server until you delete them.
Detailed explanation on how to do this from Mozilla support:
Thanks for the tips, all. I’m trying to create a new email folder on Thunderbird per the above instructions, but I’m having a difficult time getting my ISP to play nice with it. I keep entering the same password, which I am 100% certain is correct, but then the password screen pops up again with no new messages on it, repeatedly. It did this for the username too a few times before it finally went through. We’ll see what happens…
If you have access to webmail with your main account, it’s a virtual certainty the username and password you use there on the website are the ones you’ll need to successfully configure IMAP.
Yes, that’s why I said I’m certain that my username and password are correct.
Now it’s just repeating the request for the code it sent me by text over and over again. I enter the code, it thinks for a while, it requests the code again, I enter it again, it thinks for a while, it requests the code again, I enter it again, it thinks for a while, it requests the code again…
And after a few attempts, it booted me back to the beginning of the process. I have to enter my user ID again. I enter my user ID, it thinks for a while, then asks for my user ID. I enter my user ID, it thinks for a while, then asks for my user ID…
So, just to confirm, you’re using the email from your ISP (like leaper@yourisp.com) as your address, right, and not something like Gmail or iCloud mail?
If so, your ISP should have specific directions about how to set up IMAP, and/or a tech support system that should be able to walk you through it step by step.
Note that you probably need to change (or replace) any existing POP3 setup you might already have in Thunderbird, not just add another IMAP one on top of it (or else BOTH will run and the POP3 would still download and remove all the messages).
But anyway if you’re using the ISP email, just contact them and make them show you how to fix it. It’s what you pay them for, and the settings are all a little different between each ISP anyway.
Maybe if you just don’t like change, or are perfectly happy with your current setup (minus the disappearing messages)?
No snark intended. It’s just that there have been many email providers, paid and free, for a few decades now, and anybody who’s fussy about their email presumably long ago found their provider of choice. And those who don’t really care just end up with Gmail, iCloud, or their ISP email by default. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just email.
You can make a free Yahoo account and try out the web mail interface on a new address if you really want to compare.
But if you mainly use Thunderbird anyway and not the web mail interface or a mobile app, you’re probably not going to notice much difference. Maybe slightly different spam detection rates?
If you’re happy with what you have, just keep using it. If you’re not, well, what else isn’t working well?
There’s also a few minor caveats in that link that you should read first, like having to set up Thunderbird with a new connection to Yahoo, losing messages with attachments bigger than 25MB, losing filters and forwarding, etc.
Yeah, I saw that as well. When Cox email became part of Yahoo, there was no option. Cox warned everybody well in advance, but when your time came, your Cox email account was switched whether you wanted it or not. (I don’t remember if it was a gradual move, or if all Cox customers were switched at the same time.)