Win 10 upgrade soon to be AUTOMATIC ?

[devil84]

This is a really interesting conundrum. If it's deleted off the remote server but is present on your local drive, will IMAP copy them from the local to the email server, or will it "copy" the blank email server to your local? I'd make a copy of the local email folders before trying it!

On my win7 machine (YMMV with W10), the folder for email is:

c:\users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\[gobbledeegook].default\mail\pop.googlemail.com\

and that last folder will be named differently depending on your mailserver. (pop.yahoo.com or something might be one)

Good info, cspan.

I found that Yahoo has the ability to restore deleted emails within 7 days -- it's pretty easy to find in the help file (I sent specific instructions offline to Kimist). POP3, which has the "leave emails on server" option, works a bit differently than IMAP. IMAP probably will work nicely with your method (I think...the instruction to make a copy of the local email folders before trying is really important!). Doing it this way will be a lot faster than sending all those emails back up to the server.

Some further information that might be helpful: IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) was designed for cloud storage, so it's much more interactive and geared for synchronizing multiple storage location for various devices. POP3 (Post Office Protocol) is old school, invented when server space was really limited and local storage was plentiful (we all had plenty of boxes of 5-1/4" floppies!). It's more of a one-way delivery system, much like post office boxes in the post office. The postal worker puts mail in, and when you go to check it, you usually take it all out. There's no room ability for long-term storage. When they developed the protocol, I'm not sure they contemplated anyone to want to put their delivered mail back on the server, so I'm guessing there are no user-available ways to do that. I'd guess that IMAP was developed instead, which adds a lot more capability.

So...depending on how you can access your account, if POP3 is the only way to do it, you can't put them back on the server -- without your provider's help, anyway. If you can switch it to IMAP, you probably can. I know that through Outlook, I can drag my email from one account (say, my POP3 account) to an IMAP folder and it will nicely appear in my inbox, so I'm guessing that IMAP will sync an old nicely, too. Even so, for every minute it took copying it off the server, it may take 4 times as long to put it back (your upload speed is slower than download). And maybe...just maybe...Win10 Mail left them all on the server (though, with my luck, the default is always whatever makes the most work for me!).

[cspan37421]

POP3 (Post Office Protocol) is old school, invented when server space was really limited and local storage was plentiful (we all had plenty of boxes of 5-1/4" floppies!). It's more of a one-way delivery system, much like post office boxes in the post office. The postal worker puts mail in, and when you go to check it, you usually take it all out.

yo dawg -

That's the way I like it!

https://youtu.be/L7iUACK52E0

uh huh
uh huh
------------------
To me, not having my email hanging around in the cloud for anyone to try to hack outweighs any convenience of being able to access all of my email at anytime on any device from anywhere. It's just not that critical or helpful, to me. Not sure if I've been hacked before, but gone through enough credit card fraud situations that to me, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. JMHO.

[Kimist]

It's been another long day. . .losing ~2 weeks of work during tax season is a serious bummer.

I found the legit Adobe reader site for Win 10 (thanks!) and that problem is resolved.

I turned off, I think, any future files going to OneDrive. I'm a bit leery of erasing those that are already there...or is it here...or is it both?? I'll deal with that later.

My Thunderbird options have been reviewed, to include the "don't delete from server." For all intents and purposes, the T'bird settings are EXACTLY the same they were with my Win 7 system. (I also made sure I had logged out of my my webmail yahoo (aka bellsouth) email account. Those are all shut down.

The downloads continue. I'm now in July of 2012 and moving forward. . .still showing around 11k messages remaining. Problem is they're going in chronological order, so I have to rely on linked cell phone or Yahoo web mail to see current messages. There is no telling what happens to the files currently being downloaded (again) into T'bird. I'll let things roll for a while tonight since I'm not in danger of taking out any "new" messages on the server.

Darnedest thing I've ever encountered. I'm depending on my wise Duke friends with far more experience to let me know what the hades is going on. . .

Long day. Gotta take a break.

Thanks again to all for the replies / suggestions / hand-holding / etc.

k