Lost all my Emails after scan - help!

[slippy147]

I installed Avast last night and left it to run, it identified i had Phish-Bankfraud1-Troj [Htm] (whatever that may be).

I've just gone to check my Emails and everything in my inbox has gone! (i'm using Thunderbird)

Can anyone help me please?

[Lisandro]

This was posted a lot of times before... Sorry, this is a Thunderbird problem by desing and not avast. Thunderbird (as stated in their webpage) delete all the mail box and not only the infected mail when processed by an antivirus  :'(  

[slippy147]

Oh heck!!

Well thanks for the info, not sure what to do now but at least i haven't lost anything very important (apart from my flight details for tuesday lol)

It's good to know not to blame Avast anyway

Thanks for getting back so quickly with the advice, cup of tea and a bit of chin rubbing now i think!  

Richard

[DavidR]

A search of these forums for your topic will no doubt return many hits as this topic has been  previously discussed a number of times.

Also discused were some tools that could restore deleted files. If you were able to restore the deleted inbox file, you would still be left with the manuall finding of the infected email and deleting it then clearing the deleted email folder contents.

Links Thread

Follow Thunderbirds advice and don't use the inbox to store email, it should only be used for temp use, read your email and put it in a folder appropriate to the content of the email. That way you inbox is almost always nearly empty, so you don't lose lots of email as a rsult of infection, corruption, etc.

[slippy147]

Ok

Thankyou for your advice, I'm going to spend the rest of the evening trying to sort this out lol

Also, thankyou for all the links you sent me, hopefully i'll resolve the problem, if not, well, i've learnt my lesson

Richard

[conazus]

Set Thunderbird to download your email into the local folder.  Before doing so copy all messages in all folders,  inbox and those you may have setup yourself  into the local folders area.      Thunderbird will then download your mail always into the local folder and the problem will not happen again.  


Tools>Account Settings>Server Settings>Advanced Tab

[slippy147]

Cheers for that Connie

I've set it up now so hopefully that'll take care of it.

Thanks to everyone for the help and advice.

[whocares]

Hi Connie,

why should avast not find then malware in the local-folder-INBOX.. and delete that INBOX ?
 

Btw: this is another good example as to why one should NEVER delete stuff with an AV, if you're not 111% sure of what you're doing.. !!

MOVE findings to avast's CHEST (if it's unrepairable)


 

[conazus]

Hi Connie,

why should avast not find then malware in the local-folder-INBOX.. and delete that INBOX ?
 

hi  

I tested it, because I was curious about that myself.   I have an old system here that has little on it, and that I dont use often...   I disconnected the other systems in the house from the router first before doing this so that I would not risk infecting them.      What happened to the user had happened to me in the past and I remembered a site I had gotten the virus from... so I went there with the old system and downloaded the file again...     poof...   my inbox was deleted.    I then cleaned the system and changed TBird to download all my mail into the local folders... went back to that site and once again downloaded the file.   The virus was detected,  however this time my inbox (local) was not deleted      

No,  I do not know why    

[DavidR]

I too like whocares am surprised that it didn't delete the local inbox.

Did avast successfully remove the virus, leaving the local inbox folder intact?

If so TB may be storing the emails individually in this local folders inbox option, rather than multiple emails inside one file (inbox.). avast! obviously can't extract a single email from within a file of multiple emails, but can remove a single infected email if it is in a local folder (a proper folder on the HDD not a file pretending to be a folder).

Do you know the location of the local inbox you can check if emails are stored individually there.

[RejZoR]

Another alternative is to use large web based email service (with 250MB or even 1GB of space). This way you won't loose any mail on system crashes or when you encounter viruses.