I am at a loss - mozmail issue

Wow, just got home and fired up mozilla to check my mail and was stunned to find that all my settings were lost, and my inbox was completely wiped out.

It was like I just installed a new copy off mozilla on a fresh machine. Has any of you had this happen before????

I am at a loss - now I have to look for the messages on the hard drive; this is the strangest thing I have ever seen...

happened to me yesterday so I just deleted .mozilla in ~, configured it back and it's working fine now. Though I didn't have any vital data, so you might want to back up that dir first.

Joe, any luck tracking down your data on the hard drive?

F00Fs like this are exactly why we need to work on a database backend for mozmail, as well as a nice import/export/backup mechanism .

In fact, lack of import/export options is exactly my beef with most mail clients. Whenever you have to change mail programs, or combine message lists, address books, etc... it becomes the biggest pain. Each one has a very limited import-only mechanism, designed to wean you away from the other mail client ASAP, with little hope of full data migration if the program doesn't find the other mail data where it expects to.

IMHO all mail clients should at least allow for standard mbox-style data export, as well as CSV-formatted output. It's criminal not to, really.

No rycamor - can't seem to find em. Might just be me right now overlooking them somewhere on the drive (a little stressed)...

When you get a chance, send me the links again to the groupware - that was one of the emails in the bunch - Thanks.....

Well, let's see if I can help. In a standard Windows 2000 system, the mail data is located in C:\Documents and Settings\[your_username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\[some_random_text]\Mail
. If you browse around in there, you should find all your mail data in simple text form. It should be something similar to this for any Windows system.

Remember this: everytime you set up a new profile, or a new install of Mozilla, it creates a special directory with that "random text" key I talk about about. It's different every time. If everything went blank on you, it might be that somehow Mozilla created a new default profile. Or, somehow Mozilla is logging by default into a non-default profile. Anyway, if you find the data you are looking for, you should just be able to copy all the mail folders and data (and all your bookmarks, etc...) into the 'new' default folder, with a different random key.



Coming right up...

Stop me if I'm wrong, but I believe mine is at

/home/shattoc/.mozilla/shattoc/blq7vckk.slt/Mail/mail.whatever.net/Inbox

Please correct me if that's not really the mail box.

[edit]
Ooops... wandered off for quite some time after hitting "Reply". Well.. I think that's where it'd be if you were using Linux anyway...
[/edit]

Yes, that is a typical location of the Mozilla mail box for a Unix system. The [stuff].slt directory is the random key I was talking about. I guess ".slt" stands for "salt". It's different every time, even if you install Mozilla again, with exactly the same settings.

This is COMPLETELY not helpful right now, but Ximian Evolution is probably the best email client I have EVER used- and I've email for 10 years (long by some, short by others).

It has excellent import/export filters and handles standard mbox format. One other cool thing- it has really great filters (including regex support) and is pretty fast with the new versions. I'd check it out, if you feel so inclined to get a specialized email client (specialization is usually a good thing. . .)

Hey Hero - that is a very good looking product. I see they also have a range of other products also; nice....

I did find the old mails - I was looking in the wrong profile folder.

I am trying to import the messages back into mozmail, only problem is there is no option for importing moz messages. Now, there is an option for importing communicator 4x, eudora, outlook and outlook express and no option for mozmail messages - go figure.

Well, I have already been chopping up composer code and adding features - time to put mozmail on the list now...

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Thanks for the help guys and Merry Christmas/Happy New Year...

There is no need to import the messages. Just copy the whole mail folder from the old profile into the new profile. That is, unless you have already started using some messages in the new profile. In that case, I think you will have to open up your new inbox file, copy the messages, and append them into the old inbox file, and etc... for other folders in your mail.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, etc... to you and yours, too .

Crap, it just happened to me, as well. It seems as if the prefs.js has been lost, and the autobacked up one has been too. I guess I should have backed that up for real, huh.

Dam* Beavers!

Does anybody have a clue why this happened? It seems pretty arbitrary.

file this under wouldn't it be cool if...

I wish mozilla mail would store its prefs file on the imap server itself, so that I could log on with any mozilla and get all my prefs. I know this is possible, does anybody know if anybody is working on it?