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My boss deleted some of my email while I was on vacation and I want them back. They are not in the trash folder. Can they be retrieved?

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I was gone on vacation and my boss was trying to be helpful by taking care of a couple requests I received via email. Once he completed the requests he deleted the emails so that I wouldn't do them again. Well, I save those emails for future reference. I looked in the trash folder and they are not there. Is there a way for me to retrieve them?

I was gone on vacation and my boss was trying to be helpful by taking care of a couple requests I received via email. Once he completed the requests he deleted the emails so that I wouldn't do them again. Well, I save those emails for future reference. I looked in the trash folder and they are not there. Is there a way for me to retrieve them?

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You can, if folders haven't been compacted yet. By default, Thunderbird would have saved that message in an MBOX file inside your profile folder. When the message is deleted like your boss did, the message doesn't get erased from the mbox file, instead it's just marked as deleted so that it's not visible in Thunderbird. It's permanently erased when folders are compacted. Compacting folders means purging messages that are marked as deleted, to reduce the size of the mbox file in which they were stored.

Is this an IMAP or POP account?