Recovering deleted Emails from thunderbird

[Pyrotechnic]

When you delete an email, in principle, not final. The deletion is not done until compacted the folder (to save space). If you accidentally emptied the trash, the application does not allow for an easy way to retrieve your messages, although there is a way to retrieve them, if you have not compacted the folder.

Please close the application

Thunderbird (after version 2.0.0.4) has an option to recover accidentally deleted messages, to use, go to the Edit menu and select Undo. This is true until you restart Thunderbird or have compacted the folder.


After closing the application

If it is too late to use the option outlined in the previous paragraph, there are four different possibilities to retrieve your messages. Which is best depends on how many messages you need to recover and the technical level you have.

Messages in a folder are stored in a text file with the same name of the folder and saved in the profile folder.

For example, to retrieve a deleted message from the inbox of your Gmail account:

1. Get the profile folder.
   
   
2. Go to the Mail subdirectory.
   
   
3. In the case of gmail, go to the directory pop.gmail.com
   
   
4. Locate the file called Inbox (no extension).
   
   
5. Open the file in the folder you want to retrieve a text editor and find the text of the message you want to retrieve.

The message will have a header that is similar to X-Mozilla-Status: 1001. Edit the value of X-Mozilla-Status to 0, thus leaving X-Mozilla-Status: 0 and save the changes.

The next time you open your mail client, the message will appear as unread message.

[Pyrotechnic]

If you have deleted an account in error, you worry, you can restore it even if compaction has been performed since its deletion. Indeed, the account is no longer visible in Thunderbird but not deleted from your profile.

For safety, before you restore the account, make a backup of your profile and follow the following steps:

• Start Thunderbird and create a new account with the same email and same server settings as those of the account that you deleted.
  
  
• Close Thunderbird and go to your profile then in the Mail directory [3], and verify that the previous step has created a new directory for the new account.
  
  
• Copy the contents of the directory for the account deleted by mistake and paste it into the directory you just created.
  
  
• Restart Thunderbird, your messages should be fully restored.