Thunderbird doesn't automatically set up or create email accounts of its own accord. So what exactly did you do?

I don't understand what you were trying to achieve by deleting and recreating the account on the server. I'm not even sure how that is possible.

I am the website administrator and I had over 200 Gigs of old email so rather than use webmail to delete it one page at a time I just deleted the account, which deleted the emails, and recreated it with the same username and password. When I went back to TB to check that all was still good, the screen flashed and BOOM all the folders were gone.

I looked at the account settings and low and behold what was a standard POP3 was now an IMAP account. I swear I did nothing to encourage this behavior.

So I went to online support looking for a solution, tried all the standard "oops I deleted my account where is my stuff", looked in the profiles directory for files, and resorted to making a new POP3 account in my old settings and deleting (in TB) the IMAP account. Of course, nothing was recovered from my old account, no folders magically appeared, but I recalled that support says nothing gets really deleted so it has to be somewhere. So where is it and can I use the import/export addon or something else to get it back?

BTW, TB kept my old address book, but only one or two other files in the profiles directory. All the others are dated yesterday or today.

I'm thinking it was an IMAP-connected account all along. You removed messages on the server and Thunderbird synchronized.

So where are the old folders and messages? They still have to be somewhere and recoverable one way or another, right?

In principle, deleted messages are still in the mailbox folder but marked as hidden until it is compacted, when they are finally removed.

This add-on:

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

…may be useful in recovering those deleted messages.

Thanks the addon looks very useful, but I need to recover lost folders and their stored messages. Any way to do that? They must be hidden somewhere ...

Your initial observation that the account was originally an IMAP account was correct. I contacted my web service provider and asked them to restore my deleted webmail, which they did, then using your deleted email recovery app I was able to recover my missing folders and all the stored emails. Thank you SO MUCH for your help and I hope you are able to pass along the idea of restoring webmail from the server then recovering lost data with the recovery app. Cheers!

BTW, immediately upon submitting my first inquiry I received two SPAM emails from news@update.shpointo.com, and I'd guess that someone is mining your support forums for addresses.

As A moderator I can not access your email address. SO the only way mining could occur that I could see is a router somewhere is recording email addresses.

That very well could be the case. However ...

I'm alerting you all to the possibility that somewhere along the line, if Mozilla is using a secure connection to create accounts and a secure link back to verify the account then someone somewhere may be able to intercept and decrypt that information. I

I received one spam from "Survivors" sent to the email I used for the account and another identical spam using my real first name immediately upon using the email link to verify the account with Mozilla.

Coincidence does not prove causality, and I'm not pointing a finger at anyone. I'm just doing the right thing by letting you know what happened to me.

No reply necessary, consider this ticket closed and thank you all very much for the help.

how do I open/install recDelMsg windows doesn't know what program to use. Do I have to call att about Del web mail?

WestCelt said

how do I open/install recDelMsg windows doesn't know what program to use. Do I have to call att about Del web mail?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/installing-addon-thunderbird

Thanks for that info I've saved it and will use it in the future. I got everything back by using Troubleshooting and then when I found my profiles folder I copied the folders and correspondingly named word files into the new profile folder and Volia! everything was back. Thanks