Boy were my pants brown
I’ve just had an extremely narrow escape. As many of you probably know, I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my email application of choice. Yes, I’m well aware of the downsides of using POP3 email as opposed to something web-based, but I do so mainly for the convenience (I’ve used my @ntlworld.com address for years and have never got round to fully migrating to something like Gmail) and also because of the various advanced functions it offers. Well, this evening I discovered just how wrong things can go when cursed with the combination of Thunderbird and a finger that happens to land in the wrong location at the wrong time.
Picture the scene. I’m happily tapping away at my keyboard, replying to a message on some forum or other. The “new email” notification icon pops up the System Tray. “Oh, how nice,” I think. “Someone is speaking to me. Either that or they’re offering me viagra or trying to get me to send money to Nigeria.” I alt-tab to Thunderbird. Sure enough, it’s junk mail. “Not to worry,” I think, “I’ll just press Shift+Delete to remove it permanently. All well and good, only somehow (please don’t ask me how), I managed to accidentally select the entire contents of my Inbox beforehand. The Shift+Delete command, as you can probably guess deletes selected items without first sending them to the Trash folder. In other words, it removes them for good.
Only not quite. After a good half hour of panic and frantic rushing around the web, hoping against hope that there would be some way of reversing this seemingly irreversible process, I came upon an article at JiveBay which revealed to me that not only is no Thunderbird deletion actually permanent, it is also actually fairly straightforward to restore every single email I’ve ever deleted, since the beginning of time. (Seriously, my most sincere thanks to the author of this post. I owe him/her a glass of Pepsi Max.)
Crisis averted. Problem number two… well, you remember when I said “since the beginning of time”, don’t you? Would you care to guess how many emails you’ve received in the last five years? For me personally, it’s into the millions, what with all the forum reply notifications, advertisements for penis enlargement, comment notifications for Whiggles.com, and a disturbingly large amount of mass mailshots from the University of Glasgow that come my way. Most of these get deleted without a second thought. Well, they’ve all just been undeleted, and my Inbox now looks like the centre of London during rush hour. I have an impressive 21,790 reply notifications from Dark Discussion alone, before I even get on to spam and everything else that’s going to have to be deleted.
Needless to say, I’m extremely relieved to have managed to salvage all my mail (my previous backup was nearly a year old… note to self: backup more often), but I’m now looking forward to many a gruelling hour of hitting “Delete”. This time without the Shift key.
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