Avast Deleted My Whole Inbox in Thunderbird, THANKS AVAST!

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I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my email clinet.  I just had the unthinkable happen. A colleague sent me an email containing an exe compiled from visual studio. As soon as I received it avast premier 2015 detected it as virus and immediately deleted it! WOW Nice job avast! As soon as this happened all my inbox was gone! I'm still amazed at how stupid this action was! Just because of one email I received which wasn't even a virus my whole INBOX had to suffer! My whole life is in there! My business is at halt at the moment and if I'm unable to restore that inbox full of years and years of emails my business is literally back to suqare one!

When I checked the virus chest, only 4 files can be extracted, which are the program that has been sent to me! The file INBOX that went missing from my Thunderbird profile cannot be found in the virus chest! Without that file I cannot regain my inbox messages! I'm guessing the file somehow got corrupted and went missing because of the avasts action on it trying to delete the "virus" it detected..

I immediately shut down my PC in case I would need to run a recovery software so I can hunt down the missing INBOX file from my thunderbird profile! However this is unacceptable !!! Why would avast interfere in places where it cannot do it's job properly !! Why would it delete emails without asking first even because of suspicious files !! This was not EVEN A VIRUS!! And why would avast delete the whole inbox for just one email! This is unacceptable and I won't accept a negative answer to my request here! MY INBOX MUST BE RESTORED IMMEDIATELY! I DON'T CARE HOW YOU DO IT, I WANT YOU TO RESTORE MY INBOX NOW! I WILL SUE AVAST BECAUSE OF THIS! IF I KNEW THAT THERE WAS EVEN A REMOTE CHANCE OF SOMETHING LIKE THIS HAPPENING WITH AVAST I WOULDN'T EVEN LOOK AT AVAST'S PRODUCTS! THIS IS JUST TERRIBLE!!!!

[Pondus]

was this on your Gmail account? ...... have you logged in using webmail to see if your mail is still there?

[LesF]

I imagine it would have moved the mailbox file to the chest, from where you should be able to find it, select "restore and add to exclusions".

[stibi]

My whole life is in there!

Then restore the backup of your email data.

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It is a custom domain name email, not gmail. I was using it with IMAP. I've asked my hosting provider if they are able to somehow restore the emails.

No the inbox file is not in the chest I'm afraid, that's why it's so frightening. If avast can do this to you just because of an email containing false positive than avast has serious issues.

Unfortunately I don't have a backup because I was using live sync with IMAP. When my offline emails got deleted in Mozilla Thunderbird it synced with the email server and deleted the emails there as well. A tragedy.

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MY INBOX MUST BE RESTORED IMMEDIATELY! I DON'T CARE HOW YOU DO IT, I WANT YOU TO RESTORE MY INBOX NOW! I WILL SUE AVAST BECAUSE OF THIS! IF I KNEW THAT THERE WAS EVEN A REMOTE CHANCE OF SOMETHING LIKE THIS HAPPENING WITH AVAST I WOULDN'T EVEN LOOK AT AVAST'S PRODUCTS! THIS IS JUST TERRIBLE!!!!

Well that is a bit shouty and I hesitate to intrude where there are experts, but I've used Avast & Thunderbird for years and never had this problem, although I've certainly been sent the occasional virus duly zapped by Avast. However I've seen this exact thing happen with Thunderbird and Norton on a client's computer. The difference being that there was a message from Norton to the effect that the Inbox file was too big to be quarantined and had therefore been deleted. Could this be the problem here?

Client was duly grateful that I'd bludgeoned him into doing regular backups to external media. The few emails missing in the backup were readily restored from the email server.

My Thunderbird email is essential to me, it goes back for years & years and includes all the years of email I imported from Pegasus Mail when I made the switch. The thought of losing it is frightening, so I do daily backups to external media and once a week a backup to a second external media. Paranoid? Absolutely! But when email is that essential to my work, as it clearly is to yours, I don't care about being paranoid, I just do it!

[Pondus]

What malware name did avast give when detecting?

Are you sure the computer it was sendt from is not infected?

Have you or the one sendig it tested the file at www.virustotal.com
If tested before click rescan for a fresh result
You may post link to scan result here

You may also report / ask for help here.   https://support.avast.com

[stibi]

Unfortunately I don't have a backup because I was using live sync with IMAP.

Synch is no backup, as you learn now the hard way.
But there seems to be another problem, as PatC wrote:

the effect that the Inbox file was too big to be quarantined and had therefore been deleted.

Did you store all the incoming mails in the Inbox folder for a long time? When this folder exceeds a special size, then data loss is often reported. It's a good idea to move most oft the incoming stuff to your own folders - for example private, job, hobby etc. Mail folders should not exceed a few hundred MBytes.

Stibi