[CentOS] Restore mails using Thunderbird

Mon Mar 15 09:56:35 UTC 2021
Nicolas Kovacs <info at microlinux.fr>

Hi,

One of my clients is running CentOS 7 on his workstation. He's using Mozilla
Thunderbird with an IMAP account at Infomaniak to manage his mails.

Two days ago he shot himself in the foot by playing around with Thunderbird's
auto-cleaning features. He enabled "delete all mails older than 60 days" and
managed to wipe most of his 13 GB of archived mails.

Fortunately his local network has a local backup server (running CentOS 7 and
Rsnapshot), which keeps daily snapshots of his workstation.

Thunderbird keeps all configuration and mail in ~/.thunderbird, so I simply
renamed this to ~/.thunderbird.bak, searched for the latest correct version of
~/.thunderbird three days ago and restored that.

Now here's what happens.

1. When starting Thunderbird all the old mail folders and messages appear
correctly. So it looks good.

2. After a few minutes most of the messages disappear. Not good.

I don't know exactly what's going on here, but it looks like the server is
trying to keep the upper hand here by restoring the last (wrong) state of things.

Any suggestions ?

Niki

-- 
Microlinux - Solutions informatiques durables
7, place de l'église - 30730 Montpezat
Site : https://www.microlinux.fr
Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr
Mail : info at microlinux.fr
Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32
Mob. : 06 51 80 12 12