I think my virus checker checks all incoming emails, regardless of the folder.  Also, I remember that if there's any virus, my virus program will have a "popup" that asks me what I'd like to do with it (delete, quarantine, move)... but in this case I don't recall any popup that tells about detecting a virus before the file disappeared.

 

About 3 days ago, I was checking my email normally and moving messages to and from folders within Preview Mode.

All was normal until suddenly, I noticed that a particular folder disappeared (it was there only moments earlier).  Note that before this particular folder disappeared, I have been moving email messages to and from it.

At first I thought that it somehow moved out of its tray... so I went looking for it in other trays and in my Mailbox.  However, I wasn't able to find it.

When I checked my home mailbox location, I noticed that, out of all folders, there was 1 folder name (FOL07EEB.PMM) that was missing.  How do I know?  Because every other folder had a corresponding .PMI file.  Only this particular one had no .PMM file, but the FOL07EEB.PMI file was still there.  When I opened the FOL07EEB.PMI file with Notepad, I verified that it was indeed the folder that vanished.

Since then, I tried to recover the folder using all sorts of "undelete" and file recovery software, but all of them failed to find the FOL07EEB.PMM file.  I know the exact date & time the FOL07EEB.PMM file disappeared, based on the date & time that the FOL07EEB.PMI file was last modified... however I cannot find a .PMM file that was last modified or deleted during that time from all the recovery/undelete software I was using.

For your info, I had Kaspersky virus scan, Webroot Spysweeper, SpyBot Search And Destroy and Zone Alarm Pro firewall/spyware on... and I checked their Quarantine folders and still couldn't find any trace of the missing .PMM folder.

Is there anyway to locate and possibly recover the lost FOL07EEB.PMM file?  It contains quite a lot of important emails and unfortunately, my last good backup was from Aug 06 (I've now switched to backing up weekly after this incident).  Also, what could have caused it?  Would it be possible that Pmail was in the middle of writing to that folder, but something happened that caused the write to fail and the folder to become corrupt and vanish? (just throwing out a wild guess here)

Any help would be much appreciated.

Best Regards,

Sean



 

The most valid explanation is that somehow an infected message was stored in the folder and one of the virus check programs decided to delete the file, thus deleting the whole archive.

Does you virus checker includes checking the new-mail folder, as in that case the above shouldn't happen..... (the new mail file would have been deleted on creation.)