Removing an app without losing data

[Tommy Trussell]

On 6/6/06, Wade Smart <wade at wadesmart.com> wrote:
>
>  06062006 0740 gmt-6
>
>  After removing Thunderbird and then reinstalling it, nothing has changed.
> It will wont check email and has trouble showing the correct number of
> emails in a folder. What can I do?

Here are some more things to look at.

First of all, are you running Dapper, or an older version of Ubuntu?
Have you applied all the system updates?

Because of the symptoms you describe I would begin to suspect the data
in your mailbox has become corrupted. You don't say whether you are
connecting to an IMAP mail server or you are retrieving the messages
via POP.

If the messages are being retrieved via POP and going into local
directories, you might try creating a email new account within
Thunderbird (maybe call it "archive") and copy all the messages you
want to try to save into the new account. Then delete the old account
and create a new one. Alternatively, if you have an IMAP email account
available somewhere, you can copy all the messages completely off of
your PC and delete the ~/.mozilla-thunderbird directory.

If things start working correctly when you re-create the mailbox, you
might want to check for hardware trouble, such as a failing hard drive
or bad RAM. However, files get corrupted randomly, too. (When all else
fails I like to blame cosmic radiation -- it does destroy data and
it's completely unpredictable.)

Not to say there isn't some sort of bug... that happens too!