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are there backups to email folders with saved emails? how to access

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by troutmalt

troutmalt
troutmalt
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Desperate - data loss. This afternoon I stopped receiving emails - Earthlink shut me down because the 100mb online mail box was full (they want to sell additional space). With supervisor in CHAT we went to delete emails from the online mailbox to free up some storage (which I never know I had, never needed, and don't want). They did not warn me that they would also invade my computer and delete those emails from my stored folders in Thunderbird. Folders gone. I AM PISSED. Major disaster. Please tell me i can find these emails individually elsewhere on my hard drive. When I went into User/AppData/Local/thunderbird I found 3 profiles. One of them had a Mail sub folder and by clicking that I found a folder named Pending which is the one I really need although it is dated Februrar. How can I get the contents back into Thunderbird. Or some other way of finding misc emails that were deleted and restoring them to Thunderbird? For the future, is there an easy way to export my hundreds of stored emails to a flash drive or another computer with Thunderbird installed to back them up?

Desperate - data loss. This afternoon I stopped receiving emails - Earthlink shut me down because the 100mb online mail box was full (they want to sell additional space). With supervisor in CHAT we went to delete emails from the online mailbox to free up some storage (which I never know I had, never needed, and don't want). They did not warn me that they would also invade my computer and delete those emails from my stored folders in Thunderbird. Folders gone. I AM PISSED. Major disaster. Please tell me i can find these emails individually elsewhere on my hard drive. When I went into User/AppData/Local/thunderbird I found 3 profiles. One of them had a Mail sub folder and by clicking that I found a folder named Pending which is the one I really need although it is dated Februrar. How can I get the contents back into Thunderbird. Or some other way of finding misc emails that were deleted and restoring them to Thunderbird? For the future, is there an easy way to export my hundreds of stored emails to a flash drive or another computer with Thunderbird installed to back them up?

All Replies (2)

Zenos
Zenos
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If your email account uses IMAP then the messages are stored on the server, with your email client (Thunderbird, in this case) keeping local copies for speed of searching and browsing. The intention of IMAP is to keep the server and the client "synchronised" - that is, whatever you do in one will be mirrored in the other. So if messages are removed from the server, maybe by the ISP technician, or by you using the Web browser interface, the IMAP synchronization process will delete the same messages in Thunderbird, so as to keep the two ends of the system in step with each other.

The means provided in Thunderbird to detach messages from the server, so you can keep a permanent local copy is the "Local Folders" account. So to avoid this situation arising again, you can move messages from the Earthlink account into Local Folders.

Right now, your messages may be in Thunderbird's mail store files but hidden due to being marked as deleted. This addon:

https://freeshell.de/~kaosmos/index-en.html#recDelMsg

may be able to recover some of all of the lost messages.

Alternatively, you could use this addon:

https://freeshell.de/~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html

to import the lost folders back into Thunderbird.

In both cases, you should import into Local Folders to avoid a repeat of the original problem with the server becoming filled up.

BTW, I think you may have better luck in Roaming rather than Local in your AppData folders.

Modified by Zenos

troutmalt
troutmalt Question owner
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Zeno - that was terrific. I never understood about synching to the server (yes, i have a IMAP server) nor the difference between Local Folders and those folders above it. Thank God most of my saved emails were in folders under Local Folders. Big lesson learned and if you hadn't spoken up, history was ready to repeat the disaster. So many thanks, Ron ps - will now try to restore what I lost.