Camaleón wrote:
Check out the Mozillazine article about this: *** Disappearing mail http://kb.mozillazine.org/Disappearing_mail ***Maybe your mbox is corrupted... have you ever perfomed a "compact" operation?
No, I never have. I read the interresting article on Mozillazine.org, and I have understood that my mbox got corrupted because of too many mails in the Inbox folder, with no compacting. Following the given advice, I did another trial. It was matter of copying the whole of the Inbox folder to a newly created folder. But this did not work either : only those messages in the Inbox folder that had bodies available, got copied. I tried to copy 2700 or so messages, and in the end only 60 got copied, all of those with bodies + 3 or 4 messages without bodies. I still attempted to compact the new folder, but I got nothing more. So, my fear is that I have lost all my inbox except the more recent messages, that is, from february 14th on. I am on the Internet ever since 1994, and I had never lost any mail so far, having used "Forte Agent" under MSWIN 3.1, then "StarOfficeMail" on RedHat Linux, then "Thunderbird"... I could recuperate very old mail from backups that I made in the old days, that would work up to august 2009. Then, from August 2009 to February 14th 2010, I have lost everything that was in my Inbox (fortunately a few messages had been moved to other folders)
Thanks to Everyone for your help.