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Restoring old emails after accidentally deleting profile

  • 3 majibu
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  • Last reply by sfhowes

kim.macdonald
kim.macdonald
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I'm in the process of moving from Thunderbird to Outlook. I saw a number of tools online that said they would support transferring old messages from eml/mbx format to pst format, but since I couldn't seem to find independent reviews of any of them, I decided to just keep my old Thunderbird inbox and reference emails from there as I needed to.

However, after setting up Outlook and verifying all the messages were coming through properly, I wanted to stop delivery of messages to my Thunderbird account. I found the "remove account" option in settings, and when I selected "More info" I avoided the "Remove message data" option as I only wanted to stop mail being delivered - I wanted to access all my old messages. I hoped that "Remove account information" would allow me to keep my files and folders since it didn't say it would remove them like "Remove message data" did.

I was completely wrong. All of my old emails and the associated file structure is gone. I have found the files in my app data directory, but have no idea how to get them back into Thunderbird so I can read and access those messages again. I've tried the import tool, but it only gives me options to import from other programs, not from my files.

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks, Kim

I'm in the process of moving from Thunderbird to Outlook. I saw a number of tools online that said they would support transferring old messages from eml/mbx format to pst format, but since I couldn't seem to find independent reviews of any of them, I decided to just keep my old Thunderbird inbox and reference emails from there as I needed to. However, after setting up Outlook and verifying all the messages were coming through properly, I wanted to stop delivery of messages to my Thunderbird account. I found the "remove account" option in settings, and when I selected "More info" I avoided the "Remove message data" option as I only wanted to stop mail being delivered - I wanted to access all my old messages. I hoped that "Remove account information" would allow me to keep my files and folders since it didn't say it would remove them like "Remove message data" did. I was completely wrong. All of my old emails and the associated file structure is gone. I have found the files in my app data directory, but have no idea how to get them back into Thunderbird so I can read and access those messages again. I've tried the import tool, but it only gives me options to import from other programs, not from my files. Any help is appreciated! Thanks, Kim

Chosen solution

Even if you uncheck all the boxes in Server Settings, IMAP accounts might still 'push' new mail to TB. POP accounts will not check if the boxes are unselected. But you can copy the mail from the account folders to subfolders of Local Folders, confirm the copy, and then remove the account, which is the same as the method of copying mbox files.

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All Replies (3)

sfhowes
sfhowes
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Copy the mbox files from the Mail/<popservername> or ImapMail/<imapserver name> subfolders of the profile to Mail/Local Folders, with TB closed. Mbox files are the large files with no extension, named after folders, e.g. Inbox.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Recovering_deleted_mail_accounts

kim.macdonald
kim.macdonald Mwenye swali
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Thank you a million times over. I didn't manage to find that page when I was searching for a solution. The copied folders didn't appear in local folders in TB when I restarted, but following the directions on the deleted mail accounts page did restore everything.

My next question is, how do I disable mail delivery for the restored account without deleting the whole darn thing again? Just remove the server information?

Thanks again for your help! I am so relieved. :)

sfhowes
sfhowes
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Suluhisho teule

Even if you uncheck all the boxes in Server Settings, IMAP accounts might still 'push' new mail to TB. POP accounts will not check if the boxes are unselected. But you can copy the mail from the account folders to subfolders of Local Folders, confirm the copy, and then remove the account, which is the same as the method of copying mbox files.