That's correct. I use Thunderbird and as soon as a full scan was ran the inbox has no emails!
I Googled and found this
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Antivirus_software#Recovering_a_quarantined_Inbox
however the big issue is that it asks me to restore quarantined files.
In windows7 I cannot find (throgh win explorer) where they are stored
I used Norton's own interface and went to history and looked at all quarantined files however when I restore them it only restores the rogue attachment that might have stayed in an email there but not all emails...
I just lost 12 years worth of emails cannot afford it at all
Can someone please help
Thans in advance!
Hi Kaushik,
Please stay in one thread.
It's possible that due to the size of the folders Norton was unable to Quarantine the file. Check these Mozilla articles about missing email, but be careful how you proceed. It's possible that corruption of the folders is making it impossible for Thunderbird to access them.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_Issues_:_Disappearing_mail
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Empty_folders
Do you have backups of your hard drive or mail folders?
Whatever Norton or any other security product might do, it should be needless to say : It's good practice to backup important valuable data.
I backup my Thunderbird mailboxes every morning. It only takes about 5 minutes for 1 Gig and has saved me a lot of trouble.
Another way to avoid deleting mails from the Inbox, is to move important mails to mailboxes by Subject in Local Folders.
I cannot help you recovering your mailbox, but advice you to use the Thunderbird setting under the security tab and then the Antivirus tab : 'Allow Antivirus programs to quarantine individual emails' (or the like; i am using the Dutch version). This setting copies each incoming email to a seperate file, which then is checked by Norton and eventually quarantines it. If there is no virus in the mail it is then put into Inbox.
Look here :
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Download_each_e-mail_to_a_separate_file_before_adding_to_Inbox
If the messages were in a local inbox, I'm not sure (as others) what to tell you if you didn't have a backup.
Are you using IMAP or POP? If so, your mail provider should have the copies online. For instance, if it's Gmail, get online, log into Gmail, and they should be there.
Cheers to everyone for their hints & tips.
I have now managed to locate the inbox through the Quarantine History and have restored it too. Initially it was giving an error at restroration, ERROR-1000. I just renamed both inbox and inbox.msf files and tried restoring it again and it worked like a charm. Changed the renamed .msf file back to inbox.msf
Thanks again everyone - I have learnt the lesson the hard way - and have made a copy of my entire 3-GB profile folder in a standalone backup drive and will continue to do it every fortnight or so.
Thanks again - and sorry for posting same question elsewhere - I was desperate!!
If you are running Windows 7 use the built-in Backup facility to Image your hard drive onto an external drive and that way you can always get back to that state in a few minutes ......
Or better yet invest in a dedicated Imagiong Software that not only backs up or images but when restoring enables you to restore individual files or folders from within the image ....
It's so quick and simple that you could make a new uptodate image as frequently as you want.
Another advantage of the image is that if you have to do a system restore you don't have to catch up on all the Windows and other updates ....
Hi Kaushik,
There are other precautions you may wish to take, such as excluing the Inbox from Auto-Protect and System Scans. You should also move messages out of the Inbox into other folders so you do not put them all at risk. Please see the following post for information and links to some good Mozilla articles on Thunderbird and antivirus programs:
http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-Internet-Security-Norton/Thunderbird-Inbox-file-scrambled/m-p/427440/message-uid/427440/highlight/true#U427440
SendofJive,
Keeping mail in seperate folders by Subject : That's what i already suggested in my post.
I'd rather go for this solution, than excluding the inbox from scans, as all incoming emails will already be scanned in seperate files before they even arrive in the Inbox :
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Download_each_e-mail_to_a_separate_file_before_adding_to_Inbox
It works fine and takes only a little while longer when receiving mails.
Hi hvgsel.
Yes, I definitely use and recommend that option, as well. But it is still a good idea to exclude important mail folders, especially the Inbox from scans. The option you are correctly suggesting keeps incoming messages as individual temp files for a short amount of time before adding them to the Inbox where they become part of one large file. Once they are added to the Inbox they cannot be separately quarantined. There is too much danger of corruption or loss of data that can result from any antivirus program discovering a threat in a message in an email folder. Far better to check the message only as it arrives prior to it entering the Inbox, and later, upon actually accessing the attachment. In between, even if there is a malicious attachment sitting in a mail folder, it can do no damage until it is actually opened, at which time it is removed from the mail folder and checked by Auto-Protect (or you can save it to disk and run a custom scan before opening).
This is all well and good, but recovering a inbox or a local folder that Norton has deleted isn't a very effective option. It happened to me, and I have a nightly backup. It was a minor hassle to recover the folder form the backup BUT ... whatever triggered Norton is still there, and I can't find it. So every time Norton scans, it finds that file again and wants to delete the entire folder.
If Norton scans daily, I could find myself restoring the backup filoe daily ... and thus restoring whatever malware is triggering Norton. I have Thunderbird set to load incoming mail into individual temporary files firdst, but that doesn't help.
There must be a better way!
btreloar.
It's a feature of the way T'bird is designed and it can happen with other security applications I gather.
Scanning the whole thread I see positive suggestions on how to set up T'bird and Norton to minimize the problem but I must say that when I first read about this happening -- not here in Norton -- I dropped T'bird and used Windows Live Mail as the closest to Outlook Express that I had been using for years before.
That was when I was changing over toWindows 7.