How to recover Local folders and emails deleted during an email migration
IT Support Rep. Completely new to Thunderbird. I personally just use webmail for everything. My Customers use Outlook. This one, however, used Thunderbird. Customer had a verizon.net email address configured as pop in Thunderbird. ALL of his emails are automatically deleted from the server after Thunderbird downloads a copy. He has nothing in Inbox and is in excess of 15 directories in his Local folders (some with subdirectories) with all of his emails. Pretty much everything that went into his verizon.net Inbox was immediately filed away very neatly. He is migrating to an IMAP gmail account, which I set up in Thunderbird. Due to the fact he has such a particular organization, I wanted to bypass the monotony of re-creating all those folders in his gmail to then manually copy over the individual emails. I wanted to just move everything in one fell swoop. After determining that I could not just copy over entire directories from the Local folders into his gmail account inside Thunderbird, and finding some difficulty in exporting an entire mail profile like you would in Outlook, I decided to be clever and messed around in AppData. I found the .msf files in his pop account folder (...thunderbird/profiles/profile/Mail,) then drag+drop moved them to the imap folder (...thunderbird/profiles/profile/ImapMail.) Upon Restarting thunderbird, I was given an error message about the folders not existing in the imap mail, then discover that those .msf files, directories, and emails were completely gone from both accounts. Thunderbird had not rebuilt anything. Long story short, is there any way to recover these items or will I have to use a data recovery program?
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In the folder where you found the .msf files, there would have been (large) files with the same name as the .msf file but no file extension - the mbox files. These contain the message content, while the .msf file is just a folder index. So, moving the .msf files resulted in no mail showing up in the target IMAP folder. If the original mbox files are still in the account folder, TB should rebuild the .msf file when restarted. In any cae, it's not advisable to transfer large amount of mail from the local computer to an IMAP folder, as this can require significant uploading. Better to copy small numbers of messages between the local folders and IMAP folders by drag and drop through the TB interface.
Shoot. I moved all of them, including the mbox files. TB also did not rebuild the .msf folders, which makes sense if those mbox files got deleted. I've since experimented with my own email accounts to recreate the issue. With a handful of emails that I considered junk anyway, I deleted both those extension-less mbox and .msf files to try and see if any of the common recovery softwares could bring up the emails - dead end for both minitool and easeus. Its looking like I won't be able to recover the messages.
If the user didn't make any backups of the TB mail, they are probably out of luck. If you find any kind of backup, copy the mbox files only to the Mail/Local Folders subfolder of an active TB profile folder (while TB is closed), so that when TB is restarted, the folders will appear under Local Folders in the TB Folder Pane.
Thanks, I'll ask if they have any backups that they are aware of. They're not running backblaze or any other automated recovery service. Would looking into restoring an old copy of the profile folder via version history be plausible? Maybe I can restore to an earlier version that would have those files. 50/50 chance they have system protection configured on their pc. Its Windows 7.
You could try restoring an old profile, being careful to backup any mail that's been created since the backup. It's probably safer to extract specific mail folders from the backup and copy them in as described above. This article describes how to import mail folders with an add-on, but the method of just copying mbox files works the same.