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My computer crashed, wiped out everything. Emails & folders are intact on other computer but address books were all on computer that crashed. How to retrieve?

  • 3 replies
  • 2 have this problem
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  • Last reply by Sander G.

donalitl
donalitl
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My main computer crashed and everything was wiped out. I already had my thunderbird email account set up on another computer, and all of my emails & folders are there, intact, no problem. But my full, current address books were only on the computer I use on a daily basis - the one that wiped out, The address book on the other computer only has addresses in it that I used when using that computer. How can I get the missing address books - are they stored/associated with my email address somewhere? I am no techie! A couple of people have told me that it should be available - "your address book should be there with your email account no matter what computer you are using" but it's not.

My main computer crashed and everything was wiped out. I already had my thunderbird email account set up on another computer, and all of my emails & folders are there, intact, no problem. But my full, current address books were only on the computer I use on a daily basis - the one that wiped out, The address book on the other computer only has addresses in it that I used when using that computer. How can I get the missing address books - are they stored/associated with my email address somewhere? I am no techie! A couple of people have told me that it should be available - "your address book should be there with your email account no matter what computer you are using" but it's not.

All Replies (3)

Sander G.
Sander G.
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This depends on your e-mail account. In Gmail your addresses are stored server-side as well. As for other providers, you may be able to get 'collected addresses' from the messages that you still have.

Could you let us know which e-mail provider you are using?

donalitl
donalitl Question owner
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As I said, I'm no techie - but I think the answer to your question is, the email is through our website provider, which is hostgator

When I log on to go to my email account through this route, on the first/sign in screen the login box says "webmail" at the top, and when I log in the next page says "hostgator control panel" and gives me a choice to access my email through horde, round cube, or squirrel mail.

Sander G.
Sander G.
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Then your address book cannot be restored. You might be able to reconstruct it to some point, based on your existing e-mail messages. There is an address crawler add-on for Thunderbird, but it was not tested with the latest version and might not install. You could try this, however getting this to work with the latest version may need help from the author.

Maybe you could temporarily install an older version of Thunderbird, as suggested by one of the commenters of the add-on.

Addons are not supported by Mozilla directly, but the author might be able to help you with it.

Hope this helps you further, maybe a technical person near you might be able to help you out locally?