QUOTE]AL LM wrote:
-> I create this folder within TB! interface when it is launched..that's it ? or create it in my TB! directory that is on my second HDD... ??
why do you say :
- "keep it empty"..if I don't put anything in it, it will stay empty, no ??
- "delete any existing index files in your target folder" : why should it be any index files in this new folder ?? What are exactly those index files ?
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-Yes, create it via the TB interface.
-I said to keep it empty, because putting a new messages.tbb file in the folder will cause all existing messages to be gone. So you shouldn't place messages in it before you insert the messages.tbb that you want to import. And yes, it'll stay empty as long as you don't put any messages there.
-The index files are the messages.tbi (old style) and the messages.tbn (new style) files that you encounter in TB's directories. They are there to tell TB where the messages in the messages.tbb file start, whether those messages are read, flagged or whatever. That way TB doesn't need to search the whole messages.tbb file in order tyo find the 713th message or to display the message list as sorted by sender, but it can read the much smaller index file. This is common practice for databases.
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AL LM wrote: -> what kind of things I couldn't have said ?? -> "might simply be because you don't realize what happened or even don't know" : yes I really don't understand what happened because it's not the first time I do that kind of manipulation but the first I got this mess - "your message base was even a bigger mess than I realized"...what do you mean ? Before my restore every thing was allright. |
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It might be that you lost mail, because something happened at the ISP-side, a quotum that was exceeded or something like that. Those things can happen and if they happen at the same time as another disaster, it's easy to think that they're related even when there's no such relation between the problems. I meant that kind of things.
It was not to imply that there were such things, but just to say that I know less than you.
I'm not sure that the problem will be solved by deleting the index files on the problem computer, but I'm for 80% sure that most of your problems were caused by problems with your index files.
However, to be sure that it wouldn't get worse on your pc, I said to create a full copy of the mail directory first, because then you could revert to the current state of affairs.
What I meant with not being sure about the consequences for your mail on server was not that I thought it might restore the mail on the server (the pop3 protocol offers no option to uploasd mail from client to server), but that there would be a slight possibility that you's loose more.
That you're using multiple mail services doesn't complicate things, it merely means that you've got to do the same actions for multiple accounts. More work, not more copmplicated.

Though you might consider to use this moment to simplify your mail structure. Services like gmail offer the option to collect mail from different accounts so that all mail can be read via one account.
IMAP accounts can be sorted just as wel as POP3 accounts, I'm not sure how good TB is in sorting it automatically. Good IMAP servers offer server side filtering, the server sorts your mail according to your rules and that's what you'd want, because the mail should be sorted the same way whether you use The Bat!, MS Outlook, Thunderbird, webmail or whatever. But you can always sort it manually.
The major disadvantage of IMAP compared to POP3 are that you need more bandwidth, so IMAP is more suited for ADSL and cable and less for dial-up connections. And second, because IMAP stores its messages on the server, you need sufficient server space, however that won't be a problem for you as you kept your mail on server anyway, so that space should be available.