About a year ago, I switched to Thunderbird to collect all my email rather than use AMEOL for cix mail and Agent for Zetnet.

I always meant to eventually copy all my historic mail across to Thunderbird. You know, one of those rainy-day tasks you wait for the tuit for.

Now, for some reason this evening I went back to Agent and… some of the emails are not there.

Specfically, 4,997 emails from between 07/01/1999 and 26/07/2005. I know this, because Agent still says they’re there. They have dates, and sizes. They don’t have contents, and ‘to:, Subject: and From:’ lines are blank.

I don’t know why I keep old email, any more than I know why my office is so cluttered with old things I can barely move, or my filing cabinet at the Council is full of papers I have kept because I ought to read them, even though I never will.

But it’s nice to know it’s there. It’s nice to go back through them occasionally and wallow in nostalgia. Until recently, there emails in there I’d sent and received while I was in Paris. There were old flings and net flirts, correspondences with strangers and firm friends, and people I’ve subsequently lost touch with.

Now they’re all gone. I don’t know at what point they were lost. I do have some backups, but is it worth returning to the data?

I just tried Agent’s repair folder function. It made matters worse — now it says there are no messages. At least before it knew there should have been 4,997. Now it doesn’t even know that!