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My emails, folders, address book are gone. Help!

Graphical Environments, Managers, Multimedia & Desktop questions.
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bw123
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Re: My emails, folders, address book are gone. Help!

#16 Post by bw123 »

As a follow-up this is my /etc/apt/sources.list file in the new installation (stretch): Code: Select all ~$ cat /mnt/Debian9/etc/apt/*.list
aha! chroot much?
resigned by AI ChatGPT

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Re: My emails, folders, address book are gone. Help!

#17 Post by dilberts_left_nut »

Icedove is just a dummy package that depends on Thunderbird
https://packages.debian.org/stretch/icedove

This is so existing installs with icedove continue to work as expected.
Presumably the new tbird package install script checks for presence of an existing .icedove profile folder and links to it if found too.

You need to provide some relevant info if you want any helpful help - your descriptions of your setup are pretty unclear.

What has your Stretch install got to do with your old Jessie install?
You don't mention sharing a /home partition so the two should be completely independant.

Even so, it looks like your existing icedove profile is still there, but why it would be affected by a fresh install on a separate partition remains a mystery.

At the moment it just looks like user error to me.
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Ellen1910
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Re: My emails, folders, address book are gone. Help!

#18 Post by Ellen1910 »

It may be "user error" but that's what I'm here for -- to figure out what the error was so I can correct it. So here's more info on my setup.

Code: Select all

df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs           383M   11M  373M   3% /run
/dev/sdd6        10G  2.5G  7.1G  26% /
tmpfs           1.9G   12M  1.9G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sdb3       3.9G  3.6G   82M  98% /mnt/KNOPPIX
/dev/sdb1       4.1G  1.6G  2.6G  38% /mnt/WD400_Vol1
/dev/sdd5       833G   64G  753G   8% /mnt/Jessie
/dev/sdb5        30G   25G  4.6G  85% /mnt/WD400_Vol3
/dev/sdc2       105G   80G   26G  77% /mnt/SATA_VOL2
/dev/sdc1       128G   90G   39G  71% /mnt/Windows
/dev/sdd1        75G   44G   32G  59% /mnt/XP-Oregon
tmpfs           383M  4.0K  383M   1% /run/user/108
tmpfs           383M  8.0K  383M   1% /run/user/1000
That's from stretch. Formerly, I used /dev/sda as my home directory -- mounted on /home in jessie-gnome (/dev/sdd6). It still retains my old /home directory. Now, that volume is unlinked which I guess explains why it doesn't appear in the above list. Presumably, it wasn't mounted when I installed thunderbird -- see below.

jessie-lxde is on /dev/sdd5; stretch-xfce4 is on /dev/sdd6. Two days ago -- before the stretch installation -- jessie-gnome was on /dev/sdd6. The email programs on the two different desktops and on the two different volumes were identical. It didn't matter which desktop I happened to be on; I had the same info to hand.

During installation the only action I took with respect to /dev/sdd6 was to wipe it. After installation the only action I took was installation of audacious and thunderbird. Now when I click the icedove icon in jessie-lxde (there is no thunderbird icon), the email program appears without my old folders, my copies of older emails, or my old address book. Those features are also missing in thunderbird on stretch-xfce4.

So what was my error?

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Re: My emails, folders, address book are gone. Help!

#19 Post by dilberts_left_nut »

Ellen1910 wrote:So what was my error?
Not knowing where your mail data is and not understanding your own needlessly complex setup.
Ellen1910 wrote: I used /dev/sda as my home directory -- mounted on /home in jessie-gnome (/dev/sdd6). It still retains my old /home directory. Now, that volume is unlinked which I guess explains why it doesn't appear
Ellen1910 wrote: It didn't matter which desktop I happened to be on; I had the same info to hand.
How?
That doesn't happen by magic, you had to set that up.

Where is this?
Ellen1910 wrote:this 692 MB folder?

Code: Select all

~$ ls /home/ellen/.icedove/au82l5l7.default/ImapMail/mail.centurylink.net
Archives.msf  Family.sbd          Paid Bills            Trash
Cars          INBOX               Paid Bills.msf        Trash.msf
...
Ellen1910 wrote:During installation the only action I took with respect to /dev/sdd6 was to wipe it. After installation the only action I took was installation of audacious and thunderbird. Now when I click the icedove icon in jessie-lxde (there is no thunderbird icon), the email program appears without my old folders, my copies of older emails, or my old address book.
Of course - it's a fresh install - how would your old data get there?
Those features are also missing in thunderbird on stretch-xfce4.
So what did you change in that install?
AdrianTM wrote:There's no hacker in my grandma...

Ellen1910
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Re: My emails, folders, address book are gone. Help!

#20 Post by Ellen1910 »

One man's "needlessly complicated setup" is another woman's "security blanket." Each time I add a hard drive, I install fresh copies of whatever operating systems I've been using and begin using that new hard drive as my active system. I keep the old hard drives in place as 1) security (they proved they worked in the recent past) and 2) history (I mount them because, then, I have quick access to that history). What's a few lines in /etc/fstab, and I don't require elegance (usually, no one else sees my system setup but me).

My old mail data -- the 692MB folder -- is on /dev/sdd5 (jessie) and holds the old ImapMail sub-folder which, at the moment, isn't doing me any good.

My complaint is that when I asked apt to install thunderbird on my new stretch installation (on /dev/sdd6) the installer complied, but it also reached out and messed with my icedove email program on /dev/sdd5. It created a new folder called kovaoodr.default. There is no ImapMail sub-folder under kovaoodr.default.

Thankfully, it left the original folder (au82l5l7.default) in place, and that folder does have an ImapMail folder.

Code: Select all

 ls -l /mnt/Jessie/home/ellen/.icedove/
total 16
drwx------ 10 ellen ellen 4096 Nov 12 05:38 au82l5l7.default
drwx------  4 ellen ellen 4096 Nov 13 14:05 Crash Reports
drwx------  6 ellen ellen 4096 Nov 13 16:16 kovaoodr.default
-rw-r--r--  1 ellen ellen  104 Nov 12 19:09 profiles.ini
Please. Tell me how to get reconnected with au82l5l7.default.

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Re: My emails, folders, address book are gone. Help!

#21 Post by dilberts_left_nut »

Ellen1910 wrote:My complaint is that when I asked apt to install thunderbird on my new stretch installation (on /dev/sdd6) the installer complied, but it also reached out and messed with my icedove email program on /dev/sdd5. It created a new folder called kovaoodr.default. There is no ImapMail sub-folder under kovaoodr.default.
Based on what you have claimed previously in this thread, that is impossible.

It's a problem of your own making, that you have avoided providing any evidence for, that could help us help you.
Ellen1910 wrote:Please. Tell me how to get reconnected with au82l5l7.default.
Edit profiles.ini
AdrianTM wrote:There's no hacker in my grandma...

Ellen1910
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Re: My emails, folders, address book are gone. Help!

#22 Post by Ellen1910 »

Ellen1910 wrote:
I used /dev/sda as my home directory -- mounted on /home in jessie-gnome (/dev/sdd6). It still retains my old /home directory. Now, that volume is unlinked which I guess explains why it doesn't appear


Ellen1910 wrote:
It didn't matter which desktop I happened to be on; I had the same info to hand.

How?
That doesn't happen by magic, you had to set that up.
It may not have been magic, but I didn't set it up -- not within my competence to do.

I installed jessie-gnome and icedove (sdd6) first. Sometime later I installed jessie-lxde and icedove (sdd5). From then on, the two mail programs appeared to be mirror images of each other. Icedove on jessie-gnome (sdd6) and icedove on jessie-lxde (sdd5) always had the identically named mail folders -- au82l5l7.default. And here they are today. [/mnt/LXDE is the old /home folder on jessie-gnome; /home/ellen is on jessie-lxde]

Code: Select all

 ls -l /mnt/LXDE/oldhiddenfiles/.icedove
total 12
drwx------ 10 ellen ellen 4096 Oct 31 13:03 au82l5l7.default
drwx------  4 ellen ellen 4096 Oct 11 18:25 Crash Reports
-rw-r--r--  1 ellen ellen   94 Jul  8  2015 profiles.ini
ellen@topos:~$ ls -l /home/ellen/.icedove
total 16
drwx------ 10 ellen ellen 4096 Nov 12 05:38 au82l5l7.default
drwx------  4 ellen ellen 4096 Nov 13 14:05 Crash Reports
drwx------  6 ellen ellen 4096 Nov 13 16:16 kovaoodr.default
-rw-r--r--  1 ellen ellen  104 Nov 12 19:09 profiles.ini

Ellen1910
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Re: My emails, folders, address book are gone. Help!

#23 Post by Ellen1910 »

dilberts_left_nut wrote:
Ellen1910 wrote:My complaint is that when I asked apt to install thunderbird on my new stretch installation (on /dev/sdd6) the installer complied, but it also reached out and messed with my icedove email program on /dev/sdd5. It created a new folder called kovaoodr.default. There is no ImapMail sub-folder under kovaoodr.default.
Based on what you have claimed previously in this thread, that is impossible.

It's a problem of your own making, that you have avoided providing any evidence for, that could help us help you.
Ellen1910 wrote:Please. Tell me how to get reconnected with au82l5l7.default.
Edit profiles.ini
So -- you tell me. How did the new folder <kovaoodr.default> get created and wind up in jessie-lxde's icedove profile.

BTW -- thanks for the "Edit profiles.ini" heads up. Much appreciated. I simply substituted au82l5l7 for kovaoodr in the Path entry in profiles.ini, and I've got everything back.

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Re: My emails, folders, address book are gone. Help!

#24 Post by dilberts_left_nut »

Sorry, I have no interest in playing "guess what I did, but didn't tell you about".
Good luck.
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Re: My emails, folders, address book are gone. Help!

#25 Post by tynman »

If you check out articles about migrating Thunderbird to a new computer, such as https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mo ... w-computer , I think it you will see it is fairly straightforward to fix your problem. (If I am understanding the problem correctly - this thread is pretty long.)

You haven't moved to a new computer, but the concept is the same.

The gist of the process is to copy all of the contents of the "old" Thunderbird profile directory into the "new" profile directory that was created by the new installation of Thunderbird. In one of your (OP's) posts, you mentioned
~$ ls -l /home/ellen/.icedove/au82l5l7.default
That's the "old" Thunderbird profile directory, the contents of which need to be copied.

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