Critical: When a service mail is ended or when there is a sync problem, we can't save, nor transfer the mails stored in our PC

Description

When a service mail is ended, like when we delete our gmail account, we can’t recover, nor save, nor transfer the mails already stored in our PC. This is the exact same thing when there is a synchronization problem.

To Reproduce…

First method to reproduce it;

  1. Create a synchronization problem with your mail by any mean.

Second method to reproduce the behavior:

  1. Create a gmail (or any equivalent) account, with mails inside it
  2. Create this account in mailspring and sync it
  3. Delete your gmail (or equivalent) account
  4. You’ll see sync problems in Mailspring

Expected Behavior

It is expected that you’ll be able to use theses already present mail in your client mail, such as forwarding them with another email adress to another email adress, for example, in order to save the content of email.

Actual results:

The only thing you can do is reading the message, you can’t save it, you can’t forward it. Anything more pops up an annoying error message saying that it can’t synchronize the mail account. I was obliged to delete this mail account from mailspring and I lost all the messages stored in my client as well.

Setup:

  • OS and Version: Windows 10
  • Mailspring Version: 1.9.2

Question

Now that I deleted my account from mailspring do you know where the mailspring emails are stored in the PC ??? What folder ? (Note this question has already been answered by JohnP)

If you’ve deleted the account from within Mailspring, you almost certainly can’t retrieve the emails - deletion implies that content as well as configuration should be removed.

If you’ve lost the connection to the server but not deleted the Mailspring account, there should be cached content in the Mailspring folder on your computer. Unfortunately, it’s not obviously organised (doesn’t use a standard mbox or similar format) but you would be able to fish out anything important. The location of this file varies depending on your setup and the locations are here. Also note that a cache is only a cache and it’s not guaranteed that everything will be there. This is common with most mail clients these days unless you do an explicit “export as mbox” or whatever, which Mailspring annoyingly doesn’t seem to offer. I have found this free tool that claims to export emails from the Mailspring folder but it’s Windows-only so I’ve not been able to try it.

Hope that helps!

1 Like

I’ve deleted my mail, so I’m afraid that all my emails have been lost. So this annoying bug of the error message that doesn’t let you forward the local emails is very critical.

So, you’ve deleted the GMail account and deleted the account within Mailspring, yet still expect to have the emails stored somewhere? I can’t quite see what you expect to have happened when you deleted the accounts.

Your original query appeared to be about accessing emails from an account that was temporarily unavailable, and the cache is the way to do that. Mailspring could definitely use an Export feature for offline archiving of emails, but that’s a very different thing. No IMAP client guarantees that all emails will be present locally, whether they’ve been loaded or not, AFAIK. That’s not how the protocol works - it assumes that the definitive source for emails is the server.

I don’t have a gmail account it’s my job account that has been deleted since I quitted my job. And I couldn’t do anything with my mails every time I open one or try to forward one an error pop up window appears to tell me that there is syncing problems, this pop up window forbed me to do anything. in another mail client I would have been able to click on forward then select another mail account to forward from then a mail account to forward to. So since all was blocked, and the annoying pop up window appears everytime I go to unread messages section, I have no other choice than remove the account within mailspring also !

I remind you that I was able to see the emails, read them, save attachements but not save them, or export them, or forward them, nor delete them or mark them as read, the pop up stopped me fir doing any of these.

Quick context check: I’m not a developer of the app, just another user like you, trying to understand and help.

The problem is that you’ve lost access to the server and deleted your local account. I can appreciate the frustration if there were emails there you wanted to keep, but I think the only solution is to regain access to the server. Which will be a problem given it’s from a job you’ve left! You may have success if you can specify certain personal emails that are on your work account (e.g. “this is my brother’s email and he emailed my at work by mistake a few times - can I have those emails please?”). But if you were after work emails, I’m afraid you needed to plan ahead and forward them elsewhere before you lost access.

The lack of an export feature in Mailspring is annoying, and the fact that it won’t copy emails to a different account is also annoying. In cases like yours, very annoying I’m sure! But, as I say, I think that you’ve put yourself into a situation that’s unrecoverable now. (The same would be true of any mail client, by the way, if you’d deleted the local account.)

what is lost is lost, now I opened this bug issue to be fixed please upvote it to not let this happens to other osers by making the developpers fix this bug.

“The same would be true of any mail client” on that’s not the case for foxmail you can still find them in a specific folder as .eml files.

In addition, the problem would not have occurred if this pop up error window was displayed every time I tried to forward a mail to save it.

OK, so your core problem is a confusing popup that blocked you doing what you wanted when you lost access to the mail server because your access was revoked after leaving a job? You’re probably be best logging a bug about that, because this thread started by suggesting that the problem is around accessing messages, not this popup.

I know it’ll be hard now you’ve deleted the account, but if you can give the clearest possible description, that will really help people identify the problem. Things like what the text in the popup was, exactly (as best you remember it) and what exactly caused it to pop up and get in the way - and what you’d like to be able to do instead.

It might also be worth finding the threads where people have already suggested adding features like an export feature and adding your vote there.

(Finally, as an aside, if foxmail is not deleting downloaded emails when the account is deleted from within foxmail, I’d argue that that is definitely a bug or mis-feature in foxmail! Delete should mean delete. By all means, allow “export and then delete” but don’t just leave files in place. That’s a security nightmare.)

No I made it clear from the begining it’s about a critical bug to be fixed, and the annoying pop up message that blocks you on everything (transferring = forwarding). I’ll add a precision about the pop up.

The question at the end is just a question for me to be helped, the question is not the bug.

“Finally, as an aside, if foxmail…” anyway I wasn’t able to find either where the mails are stocked in the PC with mailspring, in other clients I was able to re-use them as .eml (or equivalent), export them, save them as model etc…

I changed some things in the bug description. please upvote the issue.