On Sun, 6/22/2025 10:54 AM, Michael F. Stemper wrote:

I just sent an email to somebody, asking for more information. After
doing so, I saw at the bottom of the message pane a message saying:
  Replies to the thread "CS Chapter" will not be shown.
  Sure enough, the email to which I was replying can no longer be seen.
I appear to have clicked the wrong thing. How do I undo this?

I tried clicking on the message, but that did nothing. (I couldn't
even select the text to copy into this post.)

Thanks,

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ignore-threads

"Can't undo ignore thread"

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1126760

*******

The messages themselves, have a couple header lines added,
and those lines contain status bitfields. They indicate
whether the message is read, whether the message is deleted
(but not yet compacted), and so on. Someone in another
group, claims to have used SED to undelete a box where
the customer had deleted the whole thing. So it's possible
to make changes to an MBOX that way.

But it's better to try the "tool way" first.

If you exit Thunderbird (and check that the process really
is exited), now is a good time to back up the
Profile folder, before carrying out any other actions.
Then, if say, you accidentally compacted the folder and
made things worse, you could just restore the folder
state (again, with Thunderbird exited) and try your
technique again.

Paul

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On Sun, 22 Jun 2025 21:57:50 -0400, Jonathan N. Little wrote:

You absolutely can do it with sed. I user a perl script that I created
to do it to recover damaged mbox "folders" but the principle is the
same, with caveat you mentioned "DO NOT COMPACT THE FOLDER". If you
compact the folder you are doomed because TB re-indexes the file
removing any deleted messages.

I don’t store any of my emails in a client-specific format. Instead, I run
an IMAP server (Dovecot), and have the email-client configured to access
my messages via that -- even if the IMAP server is running under my user
ID and storing the messages in my home area anyway.

This way, I can easily switch email clients, and even access the same
email store from another machine. Or use IMAP client scripts to perform operations on the mail store.

Another benefit is that the messages are stored in a standard format
(Maildir) which can be manipulated by a range of tools.

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On Tue, 24 Jun 2025 11:12:01 -0400, Jonathan N. Little wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

I don’t store any of my emails in a client-specific format. Instead, I
run an IMAP server (Dovecot), and have the email-client configured to
access my messages via that -- even if the IMAP server is running under
my user ID and storing the messages in my home area anyway.

This way, I can easily switch email clients, and even access the same
email store from another machine. Or use IMAP client scripts to perform
operations on the mail store.

Another benefit is that the messages are stored in a standard format
(Maildir) which can be manipulated by a range of tools.

Okay even if IMAP Thunderbird caches the email in MBOX format like POP3
but just synchronizes with the server than just downloading messages and expunging them on the server store.

That way, you can ignore the MUA’s copy of the messages as just being a cache: the authoritative copy is always the IMAP message store.

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