The Day I Lost 25,000 E-Mails
I’m taking this rather well considering the seriousness of the situation. The Thunderbird e-mail client just tried to self-update and… well… pooped itself. My whole “last-update.log” file hidden in my AppData/Local/Thunderbird/Mozilla Thunderbird/updates folder was (or should I say IS) full of error messages and I’ve conveniently lost 25,000 stored e-mails along with about 30 e-mails saved in my drafts - some of which contained irreplacable data. Maybe I’ll find a way to get my stuff back. Maybe I won’t. Stuff happens. It’s life. You just gotta keep moving on!
On a more cheery note, Affiliate Defined is going well - though not so well I could buy myself 30-years of video game nostalgia, something at this point in time I’d consider killing for. 
(Joke - by the way, I’m not really that unstable CIA bot who keeps spidering my site.) $15,000 Of Video Game Relics… 1,700 boxed games. Goodness knows how many consoles!
Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari Jaguar, Atari Lynx, Coleco ColecoVision, Coleco Gemini, Coleco Telstar, Commodore 64/128, GCE Vectrex, Mattel Aquarius, Mattel Intellivision, Mattel Odyssey 2, Microsoft Xbox, Microsoft Xbox 360, APF TV Fun, Miscellaneous Handheld Games, Miscellaneous PC Games, SC Eight Thousand, Sega Pods, Miscellaneous TV Games, NEC Turbo Duo, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Game Boy Advance, Nintendo GameCube, Nintendo NES, Nintendo Nintendo 64, Nintendo Super NES, Nintendo Virtual Boy, Nintendo Wii, Sega Dreamcast, Sega Game Gear, Sega Genesis, Sega Master System, Sega Saturn, SNK Neo Geo, SNK Neo Geo Pocket, Sony Playstation, Sony Playstation 2, Texas Instruments TI 99/4A, VM Labs Nuon.
Officialy the longest list I’ve ever had to type (or read at all, for that matter)! I have a hard time believing that the lot (including the 1,700 video games) went for $9,000 - as much as a cheap car. Give it another 20 years and this lot will be worth $50,000. Hit the lot and join the 120,000 other drewling geeks who already did (myself proudly included). Be sure to check out Technabob, who sourced this for us too.
UPDATE: Okay, so reality is hitting home and I now realise how much I needed them 25,000 e-mails. O_O Holy cow - techie advice welcome!
UPDATE: Well he is my Dad, afterall. Problem sorted. At least for my TechZi mailbox. Now it’s just hard manual labor getting the remaining ones sorted out. Zoids. O_o
November 12th, 2007 at 12:52 am
I sure hope you would be able to recover all those e-mails. Best of luck to you.
As for the console collections, it is really an investment. Although it is a lot of money upfront, I’m sure there are a lot of people buying and reselling these.
I had a lot of consoles, but I had to part with it due to limited space in my garage and house. Yea…it sucks to part with such beauties
-Mike
November 12th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
ouch. good luck getting them all sorted away.
November 12th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Hey David, sorry to hear Thunderbird crapped on your parade. I’ve been losing email for years now, which is why I’ve switched entirely to Gmail. Why worry about your email on your own computer when you can have a free webmail account. Anywhere you are, your mail is accessible, of course.. not if you’ve got no Internet. I hope you’re doing well, things are alright on my end.. same ‘ol same ‘ol in Sunny CA!
November 15th, 2007 at 1:43 am
Do yourself a favor and use the Thunderbird Profile manager to make yourself an entirely separate profile outside the default Thunderbird install so when TB crashes and burns like that, you and your email will be safe from harm.
Or do you already do that? If you don’t then make yourself a new folder under C:\ and call it whatever you wish (no, don’t call it that…you know what I mean). Then, if the Profile Manager isn’t listed in your Start Menu/Programs, bring up “Run” and type in the following:
“thunderbird.exe -profilemanager” (without the quotes of course).
In the dialog box that pops up, create a new profile and call it what you will (see above nonsense) and in the following steps, point it to that new folder and your done. It’s all pretty much self explanatory. Set the manager to pop up when you start TB and choose that profile from now on. Thunderbird can now go completely nuclear and your mail will be safe from harm.
If you do manage to recover all your emails you can still create that new profile and copy and paste the contents of your current (default) profile that lives within the TB install and paste it into that new folder you made for the new profile. Now you’re safe.
Hope this helps.
You can also use the same profile if you ever decide to test out Eudora 8 beta 1. It’s just Thunderbird with a makeover and a few extra features.
December 9th, 2007 at 2:00 am
Yep, that’s why I use IMAP when I can…