G-Mail Saved My Life. Sort of....

 I decided to give my laptop a lobodomy today. I've installed and uninstalled so much crap over the past year that it was running slow and locking up on bootup, so I decided to wipe the drive clean and start over (something I've done with my Windows boxes for about ten years now....).

Unfortunately, while I'd backed up all the important stuff for work and my personal folders with pictures, music, etc., I forgot to back up the data files for Thunderbird, which is what I use for my personal email...  Ooops.

So... I go to the web, look in Gmail, and see mail in my Inbox dating back to April 27, 2007.  

OK, that's almost 90 days.... Not bad.  But  I was a little bummed that I'd lost the rest of my saved mail, some of it dating back to August of last year when we moved and I started using this laptop.

Fortunately, I've been stupid with regard to GMail, and never deleted any mail on purpose using the web interface, and I usually uncheck the "delete mail from server" option when installing a mail client, because I like to be able to switch back and forth. 

So, as soon as I re-installed Thunderbird v2 and entered my GMail account name and password, I got todays new mail.  Not bad.  95 messages or so.

Next, I went into the mail settings for Gmail, and reset the POP3 settings to get all mail, including previously downloaded mail.  When I looked, there were about 3500 threads to download (yes, all that since April 27....).  On my next mailbox download, the previously downloaded mail started showing up in batches of 500 messages or so. 

Except for one little thing.... It appeared to be all of my mail, including the stuff dating back to last August.  In total, 9915 message threads.....

Woohoo!  Jackpot.  Being lazy and security-stupid paid off for a change!

Now, that's probably also an alarm bell....  If you use a POP client like Outlook or Thunderbird, and don't have the "delete mail from server" option selected or "leave on server for X days", then you've probably got a lot of mail hanging out in the "All Mail" folder that you might have forgotten about.

But, it saved my ass in a way, because there was some important stuff in Thunderbird that I needed to hang onto....