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Thunderbird email

Discussion in 'Fred's House of Pancakes' started by MarinJohn, Aug 29, 2006.

  1. MarinJohn

    MarinJohn Senior Member

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    Hello readers. I am trying to recreate/retrieve my email after a hard drive crash. Have installed new harddrive, and am slowly reinstalling programs. Have reinstalled my default email...Thunderbird, but can't seem to find old emessages. Any suggestions? Thanks!
     
  2. galaxee

    galaxee mostly benevolent

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    here's what i found, i don't know if that'll be any help but here goes:

    i'm running windows xp professional, but it's pretty much the same thing as xp home in this respect as far as i can tell.

    my computer/local disk/documents and settings/[your username]/application data/thunderbird/profiles/
    oh, and you should set your folder settings to show hidden folders and files or the application data folder won't show up.

    i only had 1 folder in the "profiles" folder, and in the default profile folder there were 2 folders named "mail" and "imapmail" that contained some MSF files, each file with the name of a different folder in the program (inbox, junk mail, sent mail, etc)

    so i don't know if those are lists or if there's a way to extract your email from there. my university email is on an imap server, so it all just comes back the next time i connect to the internet.

    good luck :)
     
  3. TonyPSchaefer

    TonyPSchaefer Your Friendly Moderator
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    Yeah, what she said. :)
    C:\Documents and Settings\SchaeferT\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\m2myhhkg.default\Mail\Local Folders
    Some aspects will vary, of course.

    If you need individual file and file type breakdowns, let us know.

    Good luck. Recovery is a long drawn-out process.
     
  4. EricGo

    EricGo New Member

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    <div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(MarinJohn @ Aug 29 2006, 03:28 PM) [snapback]311241[/snapback]</div>
    Which OS ?

    Are you picking stuff off the old hard drive, or from a backup ? I don't use tbird, but I'd guess the emails are in *.mbox files.
     
  5. Wildkow

    Wildkow New Member

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    <div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(MarinJohn @ Aug 29 2006, 12:28 PM) [snapback]311241[/snapback]</div>
    http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navc...underbird+email
     
  6. MarinJohn

    MarinJohn Senior Member

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    Thanks for your replies. Today I will dig further. FYI I am using XP Home and retrieving from recovered data files. How ever, I have the ruined hard disk and the ability to attempt to retrieve from there.
     
  7. Ichabod

    Ichabod Artist In Residence

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    In the case of complete data loss, you'll have to rely on your mail server for help. Depending on your mail client's settings, it may have been deleting messages from your mail server as you retrieved them. That's default behavior, so it's likely the case for you.

    If you changed that setting, then all your mail may still be sitting on your mail server just waiting to be downloaded again. This won't help you with sent mail though, as that's stored locally.

    If messages aren't on your server, then you're pretty much out of luck, since even incremental backups from your ISP won't help much as you've been deleting incoming mail as it arrives.

    For future reference, you might want to ask if your ISP supports IMAP mail retrieval, as that will make your inbox completely server-based and spare you from future loss (unless your ISP is nuked by Iran or North Korea). Thunderbird is IMAP capable, so it's a quick settings change on your side.