recover emails without profile available.
How can I recover and read my old email messages following a system crash and an operating system reinstallation? The C: drive was too small and while trying to clean it out I lost access to the OS logon. This required a complete reinstall of Windows 7 and to solve the space issue I installed a 250GB SSD to become the C: drive. So I now have all of the emails from the past year on the E: drive (partition) filed under “Email” directory along with appropriate subdirectories. (i.e. Inbox, Local Folders, Miscellaneous etc. etc.) All of which appear to be empty. After reading through the knowledge base I now know they are not empty and there is hidden somewhere a profile that is supposed to be able to allow access to the “missing” messages. However all of the advice seems to assume the OS has not been replaced. I do not have a profile showing under: “F:\users\Bob Thompson\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird”. There is just profiles.ini and registry.dat plus a directory called “Crash Reports”. However I do have a directory called “x6nllcb8.default” here: F:\users\Bob Thompson\AppData\Local\Thunderbird\Profiles. I have attempted to use “ImportExportTools” but this would not accept any input to the fields..
Chosen solution
If you are only trying to recover mail, I would just point the import export tools add on at the profile and let it get the old mail especially if you have another working profile. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/
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what s this E drive? and what is this flder email?
your original drive will have had a hidden appdata folder. it is only in this location that I would expect mail to be located. do you have access to that foldder from your old hard disk?
Matt, Thanks for your reply. Matt said
what s this E drive? and what is this flder email?
My E drive is a data drive on my NAS, the directory "Email" on the E drive is where Thunderbird has been told to store all emails.
If you re-read my post you will see that yes Appdata is accessable and NO there is no profile that can be accessed.
Are there an MSF files anywhere? while they server no purpose in data recovery, they always accompany the real data files which have no extension.
YES!!! Good call, thank you. Found them on another drive. Some time ago while trying to reduce the size of the data on my C: drive I moved a bunch of files. The missing profile is there. H:\RMKThompson\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\x6nllcb8.default Can you step me through the recovery process please? I have an idea how it should be done but I don't want to stuff it up.
Chosen Solution
If you are only trying to recover mail, I would just point the import export tools add on at the profile and let it get the old mail especially if you have another working profile. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/