I think you'd best submit this question to Ritlabs Support (see the menu above). In this situation I'd probably restore my most recent backup of the mail folder, but there may be a better solution that I'm not aware of.

Uninstall your antivirus and try again

Ok, ask a support about it

https://www.ritlabs.com/en/support/

Try disconnecting your computer from the internet. Recently it helped, take a look at this thread: https://www.ritlabs.com/en/auth-forums/forum4/topic15613/?PAGEN_1=3 (starting with the post by AEon from 07 September).

Ann: if you still have your old mail folder, nothing is lost -- it's just that your copy of The Bat is now using a new mail folder that doesn't contain any troublesome messages or indexes that somehow caused it to malfunction.

For now, maybe you can use a freeware program named "The Bat TBB Viewer" to read your old messages, in order to keep the important ones accessible to you. I haven't used it myself, but it's what I would try under these circumstances. Link: https://www.bitrecover.com/free/the-bat-viewer/

The Mail Directory is defined under Options | Preferences | System.  However, before doing anything, I'd make sure to have a backup of the full mail directory (simply copy it to a drive and/or a USB stick that has sufficient free space). If you point The Bat to it again, it seems likely to me that it will shut down again like it did before.

OK, so far nothing has fixed my problem.  I can get The Bat to open and the latest instructions from support is to re-install it and recreate the mail folder, which I have done twice but not all of my folders/messages are there.  I think I have accepted the fact that I have lost all of my contacts and hundreds of emails.  

I am 76 years old and this has become too much of an ordeal for me to continue fighting this battle.  I just want to be able to check my four email accounts and not have the program crash and lose everything.   I am currently using Mailbird and will probably just continue to use that and take a loss on my purchase of the latest update of version 10.1 of The Bat.  At least with Mailbird I have purchased a lifetime subscription with all future updates.

Ann

Could you please share how to do that.  I have a program called Folder Clone that backs up every night.  It backs up the appdata folder and that is what I was told to use to restore everything.  Was there another folder I was supposed to be backing up?  Thank you.

Ann

Hi Ann: The most important folder to back up would be your mail folder (the one defined under Options | Preferences | System), which contains your mail, account information, your default address book(s) and other important data.

However, you described above how you had to make a new mail folder to stop the crashes from happening. So, your valuable old data will be contained in your old mail folder, which you will definitely want to have a backup of, too. If you do not recall the name and location of the old mail folder, maybe you can search your harddisk for the filename "ACCOUNT.CFG". At least two of those should be found - one in your new (current) mail folder, and one in your old mail folder. So, that's how you could find back your old mail folder.

Once you know the full name of your old mail folder, you can also make The Bat open any old address books stored there (in The Bat, press F8 and choose File | 'Open Address Book').