How to retrieve my main email account that I 'removed' by mistake
This dumb old lady removed her main email account by mistake! My computer tells me that my "profile" can't be found. Somewhere in my panic I read that the email account is not lost from my computer but I can retrieve it. I tried to follow the instructions for finding it, but I can't understand them. Please help me. I'm really panicked! My OS is Windows 7 Professional.
All Replies (2)
How did you delete it? Was it an IMAP or POP account?
DumbOldLady said
My computer tells me that my "profile" can't be found.
As I understood from your mail, you deleted it from inside TBird And it's a POP-account. If you deleted your profile you must have done something else? Maybe something like looking in trashcan (on windows) and undelete could help you. I suppose you don't make backups?
With Tbird NOT running:
Open %appdata%\thunderbird in explorer. (If you don't see anything you need to change (in explorer) tools/map-alternatives/view to "show hidden files") It should open a folder with profiles.ini and a sub-folder, Profiles In Profiles there should be a sub-folder, this folders ext is usually ".default" but could have been altered. This is your profile-folder.
Go back to profiles.ini and open it in a text-editor, like notepad (NOT WORD or eq) Path should point to your profile-folder If not, check out were the path points to.
It should look like:
[General] StartWithLastProfile=1
[Profile0] Name=default IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/ewoxjhii.default Default=1
Now go back to your profile, open it. Locate and open sub-folder Mail You should have "Local Folders" and a folder with, hopefully, your missing accounts server-name (like: pop3.bredband.net). In that folder there are files with no extension (INBOX etc). Thats were all your mails are. (the .msf are index-files.)
If your profile folder is gone you delete it or put it some were else. If your account server-name-folder is missing you deleted it as you thought.
But If its there, make a copy of it as backup somewhere, pref on another disk, as not to overwrite anything.
If its not in trashcan you could use an "undelete"-program to find deleted files. Look for files with readable names and no extension.
If all this doesn't work you still have a chance that your POP-account keep messages on server. (Only common if you have more then one device needing to access the account.) An easy way to check this is to login using webmail.