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Efficient Solution for Fixing Thunderbird Quarantine Inbox Issue

  author
Written By Andrew Jackson
Anuraag Singh
Approved By Anuraag Singh
Published On June 5th, 2024
Reading Time 5 Minutes Reading

Grievance 1: “I am really upset I think that my inbox has been quarantined. I have lost plenty of business emails. All headers are there but messages show nothing in the Thunderbird email. I have also set my POP account to leave messages on the server for 4 days as it is very uncommon of Norton to delete the whole inbox. I really need help. Please guide me on how to recover thunderbird mailbox in quarantine. They did not even have attachments. I am really going nuts! It is my business account and all the work has been discontinued due to this Thunderbird Quarantine Inbox Issue. Please help someone.

Grievance 2: “I have recently migrated from MS Outlook to Thunderbird. I am really fond of Thunderbird mainly because of its adaptive junk filtering. Some minutes ago, I was scrolling through my email and all of a sudden my inbox went blank. The email messages were there but I could not view anything. I have never faced such an issue in Outlook so I got so scared. I searched for it on Google immediately and came to know that it was not my inbox but a Norton Antivirus issue. The antivirus caught a malware and quarantined inbox Thunderbird and its messages.

These user queries have been mentioned so that users have an insight into how the real problem of Thunderbird Quarantine Inbox Issue affects normal users. After understanding the queries and the strategies to prevent inbox from getting quarantined, we have suggested some efficient fixtures resolve quarantine inbox Thunderbird issue in the later section of this article.

Thunderbird Quarantine Inbox Issue

Prevent Antivirus to Remove Quarantined Inbox.

All messages of Thunderbird are stored in inbox folder in the profile folder. Every folder is stored after the name of the folder. So, certain antivirus considers that each message is stored separately so when a virus is detected in the inbox, the entire file is subjected to deletion, rather than deleting that specific message. Thunderbird Quarantine Inbox Issue arises because of the design flaw in some antiviruses. The issue is not with Thunderbird but with the antivirus program. But there are definitely some measures that can be taken to prevent this from happening.

Settings in Antivirus Program to Remove Quarantine Inbox

Always use an antivirus program that is supported by Thunderbird.
Set antivirus on asking mode before it automatically deletes or repair quarantine inflicted files.
Turn off email scanning options as it corrupts email files even more than viruses do. In addition to this, it eats up CPU ass well and slows down the speed.
But if you wish to scan your emails then only scan incoming messages as some antivirus programs have issues with outgoing messages.
Do not rely on the email provider for scanning operations. It is the safest to scan the email on your own to avoid any problems.

Settings and Use of Thunderbird

Ways to Resolve Quarantine Inbox Thunderbird Issue and Prevent Inbox from deletion

Frequently compact folders or antivirus may find inflicted messages that have been deleted. Deleted messages get hidden from sight but are not physically deleted until folder gets deleted.
If antivirus is unable to quarantine single messages just set Mozilla Thunderbird to ‘download each message to different file’ before adding to the inbox.

Ways to To Prevent Loss of Emails as Inbox has being Quarantined

Keep inbox vacant by saving old messages in other folders. In this way, fewer emails get affected even if antivirus deletes inbox.
Till few days Thunderbird is to be configured to leave emails on the server instead of instantly deleting them. In this way, the user can still download messages even if antivirus has damaged inbox.
For leaving emails on server for a few days, follow these steps-
1. Go to Tools option in Thunderbird and then click Account settings option. After this click (account name) server settings.
2. Now mark the option ‘Leave messages on server’ and specify the number of days.
3. In Mozilla suite, open Edit and go to preferences and choose mail and Newsgroup settings.
4. After this again choose (account name) server settings and mark option Leave messages on the server.
5. Again specify the number of days.

Thunderbird mails and other profile data should be regularly archived or backed up.

Solution for Thunderbird Quarantine Inbox Issue

Follow the steps below to accomplish the goal to remove quarantined inbox.

1. In antivirus software, switch off the “auto-protect” feature or deactivate the antivirus software.
2. In the next step, the user has to take a backup of the profile folder.
3. Now, create a copy of inbox folder or old inbox with quarantine will be overwritten.
4. Then right-click the folder to create new folder namely, OldInbox and copy everything into it.
5. After this, take the affected emails or inbox out of quarantine.
6. Then, delete the inflicted message in Thunderbird.
7. For affected account, clear the trash folder.
8. For affected accounts also, compact the folders.
9. Finally, reactivate the antivirus software.
10. Now check whether all emails are present or not.

General Solutions to fix Resolve Quarantine Inbox Thunderbird Issue

  • To fix this, just open Norton application and select View quarantine and see the name of the file. If it says anything else except inbox, just clean or delete it.
  • If the file name does not read as inbox then go to the Restore option above file name and follow the process to fix the issue.
  • Alternatively, the user can drag all messages to a new folder then, delete inbox in Norton containing the rest of emails to fix Thunderbird Quarantine Inbox Issue.
  • The user can also set Norton application to exclude from the scan. Due to this, entire inbox would not be quarantined. Only virus infected messages will be then quarantined.

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed some proficient fixes to Resolve Quarantine Inbox Thunderbird Issue. Various techniques and general solutions have been explained for the user enlightenment. Now, the next time you encounter a situation in which your inbox has been quarantined, you know exactly what to do!

  author

By Andrew Jackson

I am SQL DBA and SQL Server blogger too. I like to share about SQL Server and the problems related to it as well as their solution and also I do handle database related user queries, server or database maintenance, database management, etc. I love to share my knowledge with SQL Geeks.